


Tether Thread

by iamocelost



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Mental Health Issues, Mission Fic, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2018-09-02 23:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 49,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8688337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamocelost/pseuds/iamocelost
Summary: “Part of what I’m saying here, Vakarian, is that I’d want you to be in charge of this.” She looked out the window again. “I think, of all possible options, you’ve got the best chance of figuring this whole mess out. And after what we learned on Noveria, about indoctrination, me dying wouldn’t be the worst way for me to be incapacitated.”It took Garrus a moment to parse the phrasing, but as soon as he did, he blurted, “You think you’ve been indoctrinated?”Shepard barked a laugh. “God, I hope not. But if I were, who would know? Did Nihlus know that Saren had been indoctrinated? Did anyone? Not until his actions got too extreme to deny.” She looked back at him, and her eyes were so intense and dark that Garrus felt pinned to his seat. “But if you start to think I’ve been indoctrinated, Vakarian, you’ve got to get me out of command.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, one and all, and welcome to my ridiculous Shakarian circus! Please join me in this incredibly self-indulgent exploration of intercultural communication and when jokes/idioms/curses fail, turian mind-canon, and all the ways I can find to make my running playlist into Shepard's running playlist. 
> 
> I've been deeply influenced by a few fics and writers that I want to acknowledge here. Recidiva's "Of Kittens and Broken Things" and MizDirected's "Future Imperfect" made me want to write an epic focusing on Shepard's inner life and do some serious world-building, while Kuraiummei's "Either Die a Hero" made me feel better about borrowing unapologetically (and with proper attribution) and made turians sexy as hell. 
> 
> I'll be providing little glossaries for each chapter, with notes on what belongs to who. Enjoy! (I.e. please like me and my stupid ideas.)
> 
>  
> 
> GLOSSARY  
> targia: two-legged domesticated herd animal valued for its surprisingly fatty meat (author)
> 
> gornau: a popular turian liquor made from fermented calvadan fruit, prized for its balance of sweet and sour flavors (author)
> 
> torin: a turian male over the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> buratrum: the turian equivalent of hell; the place where the spirits of those who died cowardly and ignoble deaths reside (MizDirected)
> 
> prianus: a small, lightly-plated burrowing animal originally found in mountainous regions of Palaven and exported to other worlds as part of terraforming activities, specifically soil aeration. Priani can dig through even the rockiest and most densely packed soil to create intricate tunnel systems with multiple exits. When under attack, the prianus will dive into its burrow, then appear at a different hole, making small cheeping noises to distract the would-be predator. It may spend hours moving from one hole to the next until its attacker has tired or given up. Biologist speculate it engages in this behavior to prevent a predator from just digging further into its burrow. They also note a propensity for ungentira to reside near priani burrows as distracted predators make easy prey. (author)
> 
> ungentira: a large warm blooded, cat-like predator native to the high mountains of Palaven. It is neither mammal or reptile, but has aspects of both, featuring a heavy, plated hide along its back, and a rich, luxurious pelt along their underside. They are ferocious predators, frequently taking on prey three or four times their size, which is approximately the same as a labrador retriever. Three, five-centimeter- long claws on all four feet and large fangs are their primary weapons, but they also have a poison spike at the end of their tail used for defence. They are known for climbing partway up trees and stretching to leave territorial claw marks in the bark of trees to intimidate foes with their perceived size. (MizDirected)

Garrus idly rubbed the shoulder that had been dislocated during the fight with Benezia and her commandos as Shepard's hodgepodge team squeezed into the comm room along with the _Normandy_ 's officers. The commander had been there when he'd arrived at 0790, giving him a brief nod over a mug of some warm beverage. It smelled spicy, but Shepard just looked at the floor impassively as she sipped it. 

It had been a week since they'd left Noveria. Dr. Chakwas had done a good job of patching him up, but his plates made him less flexible in the shoulders than humans. Shepard seemed to have noticed, leaving him out of the landing party for the small-time hits they'd made against the research facilities that Alliance admiral had pointed her to. Garrus had no idea why she was still accepting orders from the Alliance, but when he had questioned her about it during the briefing for the last mission, she'd shrugged. "It's not hard to track down a few rogue research facilities while we're making such a grand tour," she'd said. "If we scratch the Alliance's back now, hopefully they'll scratch ours when we've got geth on it." 

Admittedly, she was an equal-opportunity back-scratcher, going out of her way to collect all manner of debris and artifacts that she then turned over to the governments and museums of various Citadel races -- often for modest fees. Still, it rankled Garrus that they'd spent days snooping after some human terrorist organization when they knew there were geth on Feros. Sitting here, watching Shepard quietly and slowly drink, Garrus's jaw clenched, mandibles pulling up tight in frustration. 

At 0800 promptly, the commander stood up and all chatter stopped. "We're scheduled to land at the Citadel shortly after 1300," she announced scanning the crowd. "I'm giving the crew 20 hours shore leave, starting at 1400." Her gaze cut over to her XO. "Pressly, I trust you can arrange things." With his nod, she continued. "Now, I'm not one to tell you what to do with your free time, but should any of you pick up anything interesting bits of information as you're out in your various haunts" -- her eyes deliberately made contact with the non-human elements of the crew -- "I'd appreciate it if you'd bring them to my attention." 

Wrex huffed. "You think we'll just happen to run into some of Saren's followers out for a bender?" 

Shepard smiled that tight smile of hers. "If it would have to anyone, it would happen to you, Wrex." She turned her attention back to the all of them. "I want the _Normandy_ resupplied and out of dock by 1600 tomorrow. We'll head for Feros. Any questions?" After a moment of silence, she waved them out with a clipped "Dismissed." 

Garrus stood to leave when the commander called his name. "Have a moment?" she asked. 

"Certainly," he said, resuming his seat as the rest of the team filtered out. When the room was cleared, door shut, Shepard turned to face him, arms crossing at her chest. "I need to run an errand at 1550 today. Would you be willing to give up a little of your leave time to go with me?" 

"Sure, commander," he said, wondering why she wasn't taking her own crew along. Unless she specifically needed a turian… 

As if she could read his confusion, Shepard continued. "Do you think you can pull off the cop-trying-not-to-look-like-a-cop look?" 

Garrus's mandibles fluttered in amusement. "I'm familiar with the type. What should the cop be trying to look like?" 

"Someone who doesn't look out of place in the financial district," Shepard answered. "Meet me at the relay statue at 1540?" 

"Yes ma'am." 

"Good, I'll brief you then." Her lips turned up into just a hair of a grin. "You'll get to see my military-trying-not-to-look-military outfit." 

Outside the comm room, the crew had begun to lay plans for their vacation. Pressly and Alenko were scheduling their time ashore around each other to ensure that at least one officer remained in command of the ship whether Shepard was aboard or not. Garrus slipped down the stairs and into the quiet of the elevator. He'd run a couple of diagnostics on the Mako and put together a requisitions report before they docked, then spend a little time taking stock of the dextro food stuffs and make a list of requests for the mess sergeant. He was getting tired of having almost nothing but ration bars. In fact, besides making sure his apartment didn't have squatters yet, the only other thing he really wanted to do during his leave was have a good turian meal. Maybe at Giffor's. He pulled up the Mako's interface, dreaming about _targia_ stew, a few glasses of _gornau_ , and sleeping in a real bed -- one made for turians. 

A few hours later, he was eyeballing said bed in the flesh. The apartment was musty; before he'd taken off with the _Normandy_ , he'd run home long enough to throw a few things in his footlocker and all the food in the composter, so the place didn't smell bad, just stale. No sign of vagrants either, which was good. Garrus set his pack down on the bedroom floor and began stripping the bed's coverings, wanting them to be nice and clean for his long-overdue rest. While the bedclothes were in the cleaner, he dug through his closet for something appropriate for meeting Shepard. When he'd started as a C-Sec investigator, an asari named Elias had taken him under her wing, taught him about all the ways plain clothes and an easy smile could get him things a uniform and a badge couldn't. He frowned at the memory; Elias had ended up dead after her investigation into a Blue Suns sapient-trafficking ring turned into a firefight. Garrus had been sure Elias had been set up, but the Executor had refused his request for an official inquiry into the matter. 

A low growl of frustration warbled through his subvocals, even as his fingers continued to sift through garments. Officially, Pallin had granted him an unpaid leave of absence to join Shepard's pursuit of Saren, with the understanding that he'd be relaying any pertinent intel regarding the actions taken by the first human Spectre, but his reports to the Executor had been vague and brief since his departure. In truth, he was beginning to question Pallin's priorities; he wasn't entirely convinced of the torin's steadfastness against the kind of influences, legitimate or not, that could corrupt a policing organization. Perhaps he could voice his concerns to his father… 

He gave his head a shake. Not a crate of pyjaks be wanted to set loose right now. Instead, he focused on the task at hand, pulling out some leggings and a shirt that were new but cheap, designed to look designer but failing in the details, fitting just badly enough to make the lack of tailoring noticeable. They would do just fine. 

When he approached Shepard at the relay statue later, though, his first thought was that she hadn't really managed military-trying-not-to-look-military. Dressed in a pair of dark gray leggings that clung to her much tighter than the turian equivalent would and a sleeveless blue tunic that fell above the middle of her thigh, she stood at the railing overlooking the Presidium with her hip cocked in a way that was more asari than Garrus had ever seen her body language look. He casually leaned against the railing next to her. "So, Shepard," he said, "what's this errand?" 

She glanced up at him, then look back out over the lake. "I'm going to talk to Barla Von." Her tone was low. "You're going to stand outside his office and run interference if anyone tries to approach. I want it to look like we're trying to be subtle about a shakedown and not doing a good job of it." 

Garrus's brow plates lowered over his eyes and he wanted to interrogate her further, but he'd agreed to follow orders when he'd joined up with her crew. "Alright, Commander," he said, thankful she couldn't hear the mild resentment in his subvocals. 

Shepard nodded, then started off toward the financial district at a clipped pace. Garrus quickly realized that it wasn't the clothing that Shepard was relying on in her ruse but the way she moved. Shoulders squared, eyes straight forward, arms hanging stiffly at her sides, even the poorly hidden pistol strapped to her thigh -- no one could look at that performance and not know she was Alliance. He bared his teeth a little as his mandibles spread; it was so far departed from the Shepard he was used to that it was laughable. 

In front of Barla Von's office, Garrus opened the door for the commander, then leaned a little too casually against it, eyes sweeping back and forth across the walkway before him. A few passersby glanced at him and he made a point of glaring back; Shepard seemed to want a spectacle, so Garrus would give her one. He couldn't hear anything that was going on inside -- Von's clients would expect his office to be soundproof and regular swept for surveillance -- but after a few minutes, the door opened again, and Commander Shepard stood in the opening, allowing anyone passing by to look in and see the scattered papers and broken art objects that now littered the floor. "I'll be back, Von," she said, sounding menacing in her casualness, then jerked her head to the side to signal for Garrus to follow her. 

Shepard said nothing as they made their way out of the Presidium's financial district at a pace that was unhurried but still purposeful. _What in_ buratrum _just happened in there?_ Garrus thought. It was almost like Shepard had been interrogating Von, or at least wanted other people to think she had been interrogating Von. But why? Von had been very cooperative with them in the past, putting them on Fist's trail early on. It didn't make any sense for Shepard to jeopardize that connection and in such a visible way. 

"Where are you headed now, Officer Vakarian?" Shepard asked as they continued down the promenade, breaking through his thoughts. 

"Back home to Tayseri Ward," he answered, glancing her way. "Do you have something else you need me for?" 

"Just a quiet little chat," she answered, still looking ahead. "Perhaps I can share your cab?" 

He agreed, hoping that this little chat would include some answers as to what had just gone down. She didn't disappoint; as soon as their cab was in the air, she turned to face him. "Yesterday I was contacted by someone claiming to be an operative of the Shadow Broker. I don't doubt that he was, but I'm concerned by what the appearance of cooperating with the Shadow Broker might do to other potential sources of intel we might acquire." 

"So we made it look like we're leaning Von…" Garrus said slowly, mind pulling pieces together. 

"And now we'll see who might pop up to offer us assistance," she finished, nodding. "The real question then will be to see if they are offering intel genuinely or just trying to lead us on a wild goose chase." 

Garrus's mandibles pulled up slightly in confusion. "Why would they want us to chase undomesticated fowl?" 

Shepard waved her hand in dismissal. "Human phrase meaning that they want us to be distracted following a lead that may or may not exist." She frowned. "But if someone does want us distracted from Saren and the Reapers, it would be good to know who that someone is." 

Shepard looked out the window, but Garrus kept his eyes on her face. "Are you concerned about the intel pointing us to Feros?" he asked, a little of his frustration at their inactivity coming through his subvocals. "I mean, it should be easy enough to verify if there are geth there or not." 

Shepard sighed. "How long have you been in C-Sec?" she asked. 

Garrus's mandibles pulled against his jaw even tighter, and his brow plates sank over his eyes. "About five years," he said, his words a little clipped. "Military police for longer." 

"Then tell me, what do your cop's instinct's think?" she asked, looking over to him, searching his eyes. "Think this is just a case of the Council hesitating to admit one of their own went rogue? Think it's just about Saren?" 

It was Garrus's turn to study to the passing view, a few of the larger skyscrapers soaring by his face. After long moment, he said, "No. I don't." He cleared his throat a little. "It's not the first time Executor Pallin has, uh, discouraged me from continuing an investigation, but this seems like more than just…" he trailed off, not sure how to name his concerns. 

Shepard nodded her understanding. "After we found ourselves in a rachni nest on Noveria, I think you can understand why I felt compelled to do a little more digging into what we might be walking into on Feros." Her lips drew thin. "Imagine my dismay when I learned that the human colony on Feros is sponsored by an R &D corporation that has invested heavily in Prothean tech recovery. The briefing the Council provided me with failed to note this." 

"And this is why we've held off on heading there?" he asked, mandibles and brow relaxing as he began to understand Shepard's reticence to walk into another laboratory nightmare. 

"Yes," she answered. "I've been waiting on some intel from a few old contacts of mine. Yesterday, I received reports on the layout of the colony and the research facility as well as ExoGeni's recent expenditures. It's more than we had before, though I'm still not sure what we're going to find on the ground. My mercenary friends tell me that no one who has gone down there has come back up, or even bothered to answer messages, leading to widespread suspicions that something is killing everyone who sets foot down there but leaving the ships intact." 

"Mercenary friends?" 

Her lips pulled into a tight smile. "Just playing to my strengths, Officer. I know the Alliance thinks I can work miracles, but even I need a little help from time to time." 

Putting aside his curiosity about her sources, Garrus mulled over the situation. "So you think the Council might be deliberately withholding intel from us?" A rumble traveled across his subvocals. "That's a serious accusation." 

Shepard shrugged, the jump with the shoulders that humans did that always made them look like weird puppets. "I'm willing to admit it might have merely been an oversight on their part. Perhaps they weren't even aware of the colony's origin. At the same time, nothing pisses me off more than losing people due to bad intel," she said, her voice turning hard in the same way it had when she'd policed Williams's xenophobic comments. Then she gave her head a hard shake, like she was trying to throw something loose from her ear. "But there's something else I want to go over with you," she went on. "If something were to happen to me, you'd be the natural choice to continue this investigation, Spectre status or no. They'd probably put Anderson back in charge of the _Normandy_ , but you'd take lead." 

"Commander…" Garrus started, but she lifted a hand to silence him. 

"Part of what I'm saying here, Vakarian, is that I'd want you to be in charge of this." She looked out the window again. "I think, of all possible options, you've got the best chance of figuring this whole mess out. And after what we learned on Noveria, about indoctrination, me dying wouldn't be the worst way for me to be incapacitated." 

It took Garrus a moment to parse the phrasing, but as soon as he did, he blurted, "You think you've been indoctrinated?" 

Shepard barked a laugh. "God, I hope not. But if I were, who would know? Did Nihlus know that Saren had been indoctrinated? Did anyone? Not until his actions got too extreme to deny." She looked back at him, and her eyes were so intense and dark that Garrus felt pinned to his seat. "But if you start to think I've been indoctrinated, Vakarian, you've got to get me out of command." 

He faltered a little under that gaze and that request. "But, Shepard, how am I...what could I do? How would I even know?" 

Shepard took a deep breath, turned her eyes back out the front window of the cab. They were only a minute or so from his apartment building. "I'm having Anderson give you access to my files. Past combat reports, psych evals, debriefings, personal history… everything the Alliance has on me. Hopefully that will give you some inkling as to when I'm doing things that seem like things I would do and when I'm doing things that seem drastically out of character. As to how to get me out of the hot seat?" She glanced his way with that tight smile again. "You'll just have to get creative." 

"Commander," Garrus said, hands rubbing against his leggings, "are you sure about this? I mean, we've known each other, what? Less than a month?" He cleared his throat. "I wouldn't be willing to turn that kind of intel over to my own father, much less someone I just met." 

Shepard leaned her head back and closed her eyes as the cab began its descent to the front of Garrus's building. "Does it make me uncomfortable? Damn straight. Do I think it's necessary for the safety of the crew and the success of the mission? Yes. I hope that you can put aside your personal discomfort as well." 

They sat in silence for a moment as the car settled onto the ground. Shepard held her position, appearing for all intents and purposes to be completely relaxed… until Garrus noticed the little tell-tale flicker of a vein beneath the skin of her neck, signalling a racing pulse. "Alright, Commander," he finally answered, understanding how important Shepard felt this was. He cleared his throat again awkwardly. "Thank you for your trust." 

Shepard opened her eyes and looked back over him, and this time her smile was full and easy. "Thank you for yours, Vakarian." She climbed out of the cab, signally the end of the conversation, and Garrus followed suit. Shepard was looking around the plaza of his building and out into the surrounding area. "Nice place," she said. 

Garrus tipped his head to the side in a shrug. "It's close enough to the Dilinaga to be classy but far enough away to not get the crowds." In truth, it was the apartment his father had arranged for him when he'd first joined C-Sec; he'd never felt any reason to relocate since he spent most of his time either chasing bad guys or at the Academy. 

Shepard hummed in response. "Got any suggestions for a place I could get a bite to eat, have a nice quiet drink without worrying about a brawl or having tits shoved in my face?" 

That woman went from supremely serious to casually vulgar like a _prianus_ went from one hole to another. Garrus's hand rose to his fringe as his mandibles spread wide in embarrassment. "Well," he said slowly as he raked talons over his head, "this is mostly a turian neighborhood, so you're not guaranteed to find levo everywhere." 

Shepard nodded, eyes still roaming around. Garrus wondered what kind of threat she thought might be lurking around the corner, then realized that the skin on her brow wasn't pinched together like it got when they were in the field. Maybe she hadn't been to the part of the Citadel before, just want to have a look around. His impression was confirmed when she said, "Then I think maybe I'll just start walking until I see some levos around." She glanced back at him, a hint of that genuine smile on her lips. "A little adventure." 

Garrus's subvocals gave a little whine of indecision that, thankfully, the commander couldn't hear. "I was planning on going to a little pub around the corner," he said quickly, before she had a chance to walk away or he had a chance to think better of it. "It's mostly Palavenian food, but they do some levo adaptations." He dipped his head to the side. "Maybe I could get to know you better in a more traditional way before reading your psych evals?" 

Shepard pulled her lips together, and that line appeared on her forehead. "I'd hate to intrude on your shore leave any more than I already have," she said, and Garrus could clearly hear her hesitation despite her lack of a second larynx. 

"I don't mind," he answered, then added, "I mean, I don't want to presume…" Presume what, exactly? He seemed to remember that the Alliance had strict regulations about fraternization, but he knew nothing about the specifics of what would constitute a breach of those rules, or if those rules even still applied on the _Normandy_. Or, barring that, if Shepard still followed them personally. 

"Alright," she said suddenly, before he could find a way to end that thought. "I'd like that." Her body language still looked a little tense to Garrus, but maybe he just wasn't reading the situation as well as he thought. Her face seemed smooth enough. He gestured toward the building behind him and said, "I'll just go change into something, well, something not cop-trying-not-to-look-like-a-cop and be right back down." 

Shepard sat on the low wall surrounding the plaza's flower garden. "I'll be here." 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GLOSSARY
> 
> torin: a male turian over the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> tarin: a female turian over the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> gornau: a popular turian liquor made from fermented calvadan fruit, prized for its balance of sweet and sour flavors (author)
> 
> targia: two-legged domesticated herd animal valued for its surprisingly fatty meat (author)
> 
> furca: a double-ended spork (Kuraiummei)
> 
> pari: familiar form of “father” (MizDirected)

Sitting with her shoulders slumped and her eyes unfocused, Jane kicked her feet, letting them hit against the solid material of the wall in a satisfying rhythm. The heels of her ankle boots made sharp _clacks_ with each strike, and her sidearm rubbed against her upper thigh. She took a deep breath, held it for several seconds, and let it out. 

_It's the right move_ , she thought. _You know you need someone to keep an eye on you. You know it's the best thing for the safety of the crew and for the mission_. Still, the idea of having to look someone in the eye after they dug that deeply through the sordid details of her past made her stomach clench. Well, anyone except Anderson. It had been his decisions that had added to the sordidness from time to time. 

She had checked his record and she knew Vakarian had good instincts. At least, he had good instincts when it came to weaseling out the root of the problem, finding the real bad guy behind the bluster of cronies and fronts. He didn't do as well in the actual capturing department, but Shepard had a feeling that out from under the regulations of C-Sec he might prove a bit more wily. She had her doubts that the Council would put another Spectre on Saren's trail that would take the case seriously if something happened to her, and Vakarian was a logical choice to continue her investigation. He could even use that C-Sec bluster to his advantage. 

It didn't make it any less awkward to ask someone you barely knew to make sure you weren't brainwashed. 

When she'd explained to Anderson what she wanted done with her files, he'd given her an earful about how irresponsible she was being, turning over valuable Alliance intel to an alien agent. After he'd finished his spiel -- it was always better to let him wind himself down -- she'd said, "He's a good turian. He'll put his responsibility to all sapient life in our universe before any personal gains he might make through turning information over to the Hierarchy, or even any gains the the turians might make over the Alliance. Redact anything that's especially sensitive, but leave everything that might give him some idea of who I am and how I work intact." 

Anderson had been silent for a long moment, and Jane had worried she was going to have to hack Alliance security to get the damn files herself. Finally, he said, "So you really think this indoctrination is a threat." 

"Yes." She'd sighed heavily, eyes dropping from Anderson's face on her screen. "And we both know that me knowing someone is watching will be good for my own peace of mind." 

Anderson grunted in agreement. "I'll prepare the dossier and send it out in 48 hours. Terran Time, that is." Jane had grinned; someone had told him about her switching all the clocks to Galactic Standard. Probably Pressly. 

That had been 24 hours ago. Jane had 24 hours to change her mind, but she had opted to go ahead and talk to Vakarian to keep herself from chickening out. If she backed out now after she'd worked so hard to talk him into it, it would throw up red flags, and she was pretty sure she was still completely in control of her faculties. Now if she could just figure out if people were using her for her skills and resources or actually trying to pull her strings… 

Vakarian interrupted her cycling thoughts as he emerged from the apartment building wearing a much better fitting suit in bright blue with pale purple details. Given that during pretty much their entire acquaintance, Shepard had only seen the turian in his dark armor, the bright colors were a surprise, though, glancing down at her own clothing, she supposed she would look just as out-of-sorts to him and the rest of her crew. She hauled herself from her seat as he approached, schooling her face into something that looked calm and easy. This whole situation would be much less awkward for both of them if she didn't act like he was violating her at every turn. "Which way?" she asked, letting her eyes scan over the neighborhood again. The Citadel, with its big city vibe, always made her feel fifteen again, with all the attendant worries and excitement. 

"Giffor's is a couple blocks this way," Vakarian said, pointing with his chin down a street full of neon signs. They started walking, and Jane was a little relieved to see that even in his civvies, the C-Sec officer had his sidearm on his hip, meaning no one would likely give hers a second glance. On a hunch, she asked, "Is this place a cop bar?" 

Vakarian's mandibles fluttered in amusement. "Something like that. A lot of former military police congregate there, and some of them are now C-Sec." 

Jane nodded. MPs, even turian MPs, were a known quantity. "So you were military police before C-Sec?" she asked Vakarian. 

"Yeah, for about a quarter of my fifteen." 

Jane hummed in understanding. Even the turians she'd known who had stayed in the military longer referred to their service between the ages of 15 and 30 as their "fifteen." Maybe one day she'd call her time from enlistment to Spectre her fifteen, even though it had only been eleven. 

As though he'd been reading her mind, Vakarian asked, "How long have you been Alliance?" 

Jane barked a laugh. "I was just wondering if I could get by with calling it my fifteen, but it was only eleven. Tours for enlisted personnel are usually seven years, though." Vakarian nodded, but remained silent as they walked, skirting around a pair of sloshed krogan unsuccessfully trying to keep each other walking in a straight line and a turian following them with a look that was both exasperated and concerned. It took a minute for Jane to realize he was waiting for her next question, adhering to some kind of democratic exchange of information before things got weird with her guts hanging out for him to see. _You get far too morbid with your metaphors_ , she chided herself. "You ever consider staying past your fifteen?" she asked. 

Vakarian tipped his head to the side in a shrug. "I got tapped as a possible Spectre candidate at that point, could have done some special training, but my father had… strong opinions about the Spectres. He was already in C-Sec, and coming to the Citadel was a way to make him happy and maybe keep my name in the running." He tipped his head again. "What about you? Did you always plan on going career?" 

"Dear God, no," Jane exclaimed. "I was going to do my seven and then take up residence on the next decent looking planet I could find." Then Jane realized what the obvious next question would be, and a frown settled in. Luckily, she was saved from immediately having to walk through that minefield by Vakarian veering off toward a door on their right. 

Giffor's was small and dark and full of turians of both genders and several colors and sizes, though there were a couple of asari and another human scattered around the pub. Vakarian raised a hand in acknowledgement of a few greetings, but generally speaking, the mood was more subdued than most of the human cop bars Jane had been in, which was a relief. Her turian companion led her to a booth toward the back, and menu screens popped up as they sat down. "I've been told the levo _hylene_ is good," Vakarian said. 

"What's _hylene_?" Jane asked. Most of the turian dishes she was familiar with were colonial, not Palavenian. 

"It's a platter of different roasted vegetables and meats, all served up separately, with a paste made from a legume-analogue and some kind of bread," he explained. "There's usually a serving of fruit as well. It's a good sampler of Palavenian flavors." 

Something she could pick at, then. Might be for the best given that there was a knot of worms where her stomach should have been. She found the _hylene_ on the levo menu and selected it, along with a large glass of water and a small glass of whiskey, of which they had a surprisingly extensive selection for a dextro hang-out. After Vakarian made his own selections, Jane voiced a question that had been niggling in the back of her mind. "How can you do levo equivalents of dextro dishes and know you get the flavors right?" 

Vakarian's mandibles twitched. "The best turian cooks work primarily by smell instead of taste, and they can smell all the levo ingredients they like. Even taste them, if they don't have really strong allergic reactions." 

"Huh," Jane said. "I guess I never thought about there being turian cooks." Her nose wrinkled a little. "Except for mess sergeants." 

A _tarin_ with dark gray markings on her light gray face dropped their drinks at their table, and Jane took a grateful sip of the whiskey. She supposed that now she was the captain of the _Normandy_ and a Spectre, no one could stop her from keeping alcohol on her ship, but breaking that many Alliance regulations all at once seemed like a bad idea somehow. Not that she didn't already know that Wrex kept his own secret stash of ryncol in his little corner of the cargo bay. Maybe it would be better if she relaxed regulations before any of her human crew got desperate enough to try the krogan liquor and ended up dead… 

Vakarian pulled her out of her thoughts with a little clearing of his throat. He played with his own drink, _gornau_ from the smell she thought, and dragged his eyes up from the table top to look at her. "So," he started, words seeming to come out slowly from underneath the flange of the second larynx that carried so much meaning that Jane couldn't catch. "How do you want to do this, Commander?" 

Jane felt her neck tense a little. "No 'commander' right now, Vakarian," she said. "Let's just pretend to be new friends getting to know each other." 

He nodded his assent, his mandibles pulling up in a way that attested to his own discomfort. "Then you should probably call me Garrus," he replied. 

Jane smiled tightly. "I suppose I should, and you'll have to call me Jane." 

"Jane," Vakarian -- Garrus -- said, nodding again. "So… if you wanted to do your seven and get out, why did you join the Alliance in the first place?" 

Picking up from their earlier conversation. As good a tactic as any. Jane planted her elbows on the table and took a long drink from her water glass and then another sip of whiskey to wash it down. "I grew up as a ward of the state," she started. "Well, specifically as a ward of the city-state of Atlanta on Earth. My parents, whoever they may have been or whatever happened to them, dumped me off at a government-funded facility when I was a couple of days old." She watched his face for any sign of pity, but there was none, just polite interest, so she continued. "I bounced around a few different foster homes until I was fifteen, ran away, got into some trouble, enlisted to get away from it." 

"And that trouble couldn't follow you off-planet?" Garrus asked. 

Jane shrugged. "It might have if it knew to look for Jane Shepard and not the name I was going by then. On Earth, if you're a dead girl without a name, you're Jane Doe. If you're alive, you're Jane Smith. But by that point, I had a work name I was using, and I was very careful that name never got close to Jane Shepard." 

"And you aren't going to tell me that name?" he asked with a little flutter of his mandibles. "It must be really embarrassing. Or really notorious." He narrowed his eyes a little. "Do we have a file on your at C-Sec?" 

Jane rolled her eyes a little. "I was a small time information broker who got stuck with a nickname that seemed cool when I was sixteen. It'll be in the files. You can at least not make me say it out loud." 

"Fair enough," Garrus answered, still looking amused. He was doing this whole friends-getting-to-know-each-other thing well. "So you enlisted to escape Earth. What then?" 

"Oh, you know, basic training. Assignments. I learned I was pretty good at soldiering. I got tagged as a potential NCO due to my high scores on intelligence and reasoning tests. Got promoted. Managed to survive five years of getting flown through space to get shot at by mercenaries and pirates and the occasional weird-ass rogue human colonist. Got promoted again." She trailed off. "I was an operations chief when we landed on Akuze." 

She felt more than saw Garrus tense. He opened his mouth to speak, but she waved him silent. She couldn't talk about it, not right now, not with Toombs blowing his own brains out such a recent memory, not with his accusations still unconfirmed but also not overturned. "It'll all be in the file," she said flatly. "I don't want to talk about it." She squared her shoulders. "After Akuze, Anderson came to visit me. He'd found out about my life before joining up and wanted to know if I'd be interested in doing some infiltration work. At that point my choices were to either be a desk jockey for my last two years or take a discharge and give up my completed tour bonus, so Anderson's offer seemed pretty good. Turned out, he'd tagged me in part because he wanted to embed an agent in mercenary circles, and a no one would question the last survivor of Akuze showing up with a chip on her shoulder and a strong need to kill things." 

"So that's how you got your mercenary connections?" Garrus asked. 

"Yeah, I managed to keep a few friends," she said. "I was mostly there to get intel about the Terminus colonies and pirates, not the merc companies themselves, so there wasn't too much bad blood when I left. I spent about a year in recovery and then in N training, then another year with one small outfit that ended up merging into the Blue Suns. Next year and a half or so, I was part of an almost entirely turian crew. After about four years, Anderson's little intelligence-gathering project got turned over to someone else, and I decided to stick with him instead of working with his replacement, so I was back in regular special ops and then I guess I caught Kryik's attention." Jane shrugged. "And here we are." 

It was good timing, as the _tarin_ returned with their food in hand. Jane stared at her plate; Garrus had failed to mention exactly how big a _hylene_ was. Still, she started picking away at the vegetables, warm and lightly spiced, as Garrus dug into a large bowl of something that looked like a curry with huge chunks of meat. God, it had been way too long since she had had a good curry, with just the right amount of heat and the smooth, thick texture of coconut milk. Despite her nerves, she was suddenly famished. " _Targia_ stew," he told her when she asked what was in the bowl, the curry-like smell of it all too enticing. "I'd offer you a taste…" 

Before he could finish, Jane had dunked the unused end of her _furca_ in the sauce and popped it in her mouth. Garrus made a sound a little like a yelp. "What the hell are you doing?" he said. 

Jane let herself lick the utensil clean as her mind and tongue tried to parse out what the sauce tasted like exactly. "When I was on that turian ship, I once ate half a dextro ration bar before I realized it," she explained. "The crew kept taking bets about whether I'd die or just wish I had, but I was fine. I mean, it was, uh, weird in the final stages," she went on as delicately as possible, then gestured to his dish, "but the taste of that will be totally worth it." 

"Great," grumbled Garrus. "'Not dextro allergic.' I'll add that to the list of things I now know about Jane Shepard." 

"You'll also learn my blood type, that I have no serious allergies, that I still have my tonsils but not my wisdom teeth, and that Alliance doctors had to repair a rare, congenital bone deformity in my hip sockets before I was fit for full-time duty," she rattled off, scooping a generous helping of bean paste onto what looked like pita bread. She'd expected it to taste like hummus. It did not, but it was delicious, mildly aromatic. 

"Tonsils? Wisdom teeth?" Garrus asked. "Do I even want to know?" 

"No," Jane answered shortly. "Humans are gross creatures, full of parts we don't necessarily need that get clogged up with junk and have to be removed." She tried a small bite of the meat, decided it was too spicy for her stomach to handle at the moment. "What about you? Anything of interest in your medical history?" 

Garrus dipped his head to the side. "I once broke my shoulder trying to fire my father's rifle." 

"Oh?" 

"I was nine," Garrus explained, "and he was on the Citadel for work. I had regular target practice, even while he was away, but that day, I decided that instead of taking my own gun -- much smaller, less recoil, designed for a kid, you know? -- I decided to take his Mantis." 

Jane flinched; the Mantis had a hell of a kick when you weren't expecting it. "It's a wonder it didn't tear your arm clean off," she said. 

Garrus's mandibles fluttered. "Yeah, but I hit the target dead center. _Pari_ didn't know if he should be angry or proud." He snorted. "My mother was just proud. Said she always knew I had the makings of a rifleman." 

"So you've always had a thing for big guns?" 

"Hey," he said lightly, "I come by it honest. Pretty sure the first thing my mother noticed about my father was the size of his rifle." His mandibles clamped down in embarrassment as soon as he saw Jane's grin. "That, uh, maybe didn't come out right…" 

"No, it came out just right," Jane assured him, still grinning like a maniac as she finished her whiskey. As she ordered another from the menu, including a refill for the _torin_ , Garrus asked, "So what about you? What was your first gun?" 

"A very, very old Rosenkov pistol I bought when I was sixteen and got my first death threat," she answered, followed by a mouthful of roasted potato. It was nice to know that, wherever there were humans, there were potatoes. She swallowed and said, "I only fired the thing maybe a dozen times before I enlisted. Chucked it in a river before I left the city." 

"Only a dozen times?" Garrus looked skeptical. "Did you even need it?" 

"I waved it around sometimes," Jane countered. "If I needed to actually hurt someone, I was more likely to use a knife." She grimaced a little. "Mostly, I did a lot of hiding." 

Garrus scoffed. "The legendary Commander Shepard, hiding from a firefight?" 

"Hey! You can learn a lot by spending an evening in someone's air vents! And then, you don't have to shoot anyone, because you can tip off someone else to do it for you." Jane paused to take her new glass of whiskey from the _tarin_ who brought it, along with another _gornau_. "It's called working smart." 

Garrus took a drink and set both his elbows on the table so he could gesture more effectively. "So you're telling me that Captain Anderson found out about this little snot-nosed kid who managed to get other people to shoot each other and thought, That's who I want spying on the Terminus systems." 

Jane grinned. "Did I mention how good of a listener I am?" 

They shared a couple more rounds of drinks and swapped soldiering stories -- bad drill sergeants who got what was coming to them, the one squadmate who always managed to get in trouble of shore leave, Garrus's weirdest C-Sec cases and Jane's worst cross-cultural communications mishaps. As Garrus walked her to a rapid transit hub, insisting on doing so despite her assurances that she would be fine, Jane felt the happy, vague numbness that alcohol brought, but underneath that, she noticed a certain kind of comfortableness that seemed to have settled between the two of them. "Thanks, Garrus," she said as she ducked into the cab. "This was fun." 

"Yeah, Jane," he said, "it was." 

She watched him wander off through the ward as she floated up and away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw, Jane thinks Garrus is a good turian. She'll learn...


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter is long. There was no good way to break this up.
> 
> Also, I will shameless admit to stealing from Dune, because Mass Effect did it first.
> 
> GLOSSARY
> 
> memcell: super squishy mattress stuff that turians sleep on, because pointy bits and cowl (I am 99% certain this one is from MizDirected, but if that's a mistake, please let me know!)
> 
> hastatim: turian "execution squads" tasked with suppressing citizen militias (canon)
> 
> drellack: tall, relatively slender four legged herd animals weighing approximately 300 kilos (MizDirected)
> 
> targia: two-legged domesticated herd animal valued for its surprisingly fatty meat (author)
> 
> furca: a double-ended spork (Kuraiummei)
> 
> I've also borrowed Kuraiummei's format for messages because why reinvent the wheel?

Garrus was back ship-side by 1300 the next day, feeling extremely well rested after a night spent in deep, memcell comfort. He'd brought a few more personal items back to the ship with him, things he hadn't thought about needing before he'd taken off with the Spectre and her crew, like his pillow and something to wear that wasn't armor. 

The next day cycle, he was working on overhauling the suspension system in the Mako and had just crammed his oversized torso under the chassis to get a good look at how much was real parts and how much was omnigel when his omnitool chimed an incoming message. A line of text marched along his visor's HUD: 

_INCOMING MESSAGE FROM: 06091989489 // ID.code: DAnderson-Alliance_

His gizzard clenched slightly, even as he kept his gloved talons running over the framework that housed one of the suspension coils. Shepard's files, he supposed. He still couldn't quite believe that the commander had asked him to study up on her psych evals to make sure she stayed in her right mind, but he'd decided back in week one that he trusted her judgement and if she thought this was important to the mission, he'd perform to the best of his abilities. 

He wondered absently, as he started the process of removing all the little parts that held the framework in place, why she hadn't tapped Alenko for this particular job, or even Dr. Chakwas. Certainly their better understanding of human culture and communication would allow them to notice something amiss more quickly than he would. Or maybe it was his alien viewpoint she was counting on, the fact that he would take less for granted in her words and actions than another human might. Or maybe it was, as she'd said, his cop's instinct. 

Or maybe she just didn't want anyone who was actually under her command to see what was in her files. 

Garrus grimaced, mandibles flicking down and pulling up tight. There was no way this wouldn't be uncomfortable. Hell, he knew what his own debriefing had been like after his time in the _hastatim_ squads. Akuze would have been just as bad. 

So he stalled, replacing all six of the Mako's suspension coils with the new ones acquired on the Citadel, though he kept four of the old ones that were still in relatively serviceable shape for the next time Shepard's tendency to take the most direct route resulted in damage. After that, he went to the mess to find a whole selection of dextro MREs in flavors such as _drellack_ curry and _targia_ and eggs. It wasn't home-cooking, but it was better than ration bars, and Garrus heated up one of the packets before returning to the cargo bay with his dinner and making himself comfortable -- now aided by a properly designed pillow -- in the back of the Mako. 

He took a deep breath and a bite of curry and opened the message from Anderson. 

  
  


FROM: 06091989489 // ID.code: DAnderson-Alliance 

TO: 01208594587 // ID.code: Vakarian-CSEC 

_Officer Vakarian,_

_Attached is a complete dossier on Commander Jane Shepard, per her request. Sensitive and classified information has been redacted where deemed necessary. The information is organized into three sections: reports from Shepard's enlistment to her deployment to Akuze, what I dug up about Shepard's life prior to enlistment, and her records in the N ranks._

_If you are able to get Shepard to talk about Akuze (and given your own record of service, you'd have as much luck as anyone), I'd stay completely away from mentioning Corporal Banks. The last person who did so in Shepard's presence was in a regen field for 36 hours and still had his jaw wired shut for a week. Shepard would have almost certainly been Cat-6ed that time had I not covered the whole thing up._

_Should you develop concerns about Shepard's performance, please contact me directly._

_Captain David Anderson_

_Earth Systems Alliance_

_Consultant to Ambassador Udina_

ATTACHMENT: dossier1.stf  
ATTACHMENT: dossier2.stf  
ATTACHMENT: dossier3.stf 

END MSSG 

  
  


Garrus read the message twice, then asked his 'tool what "Cat-6" was. 

_Category 6: Subset of discharge from Systems Alliance ranks indicating that an individual was considered mentally or emotionally unfit for duty_

Garrus's subvocals rumbled in confusion. The Alliance had wanted to discharge Shepard even before she broke a guy's jaw? Why discharge such a talented soldier before attempting a treatment plan, if Shepard was in fact in emotional distress? Several of his _hastatim_ comrades had gone through treatment to return to the squad a few weeks later or to be transferred to other divisions considered better suited to them. He shook his head, then scanned the text again. 

_Should you develop concerns about Shepard's performance, please contact me directly_. 

Garrus read between the lines: If you think Shepard is indoctrinated, let me know and we'll figure it out together. That was good; Captain Anderson would hold greater sway in getting Shepard out of command than a lowly former C-Sec investigator ever would. 

He started with the first data file, the one that started with Shepard's enlistment. While she'd been middle of the pack in physical fitness and endurance and had a distinct weakness with firearms at the beginning, Shepard hadn't been lying about high intelligence and problem-solving scores. She'd also performed extremely well on something called the INSECT, which his 'tool told him was Alliance shorthand for the Interspecies Empathy and Communication Test; basically she was better at reading alien facial expression, body language, and tone than most humans. There'd been some discussion before her promotion to service chief about whether her complete lack of xenophobia was a hindrance or an asset, but it looked like a very minor skirmish in what was a long-standing ideological battle. By that point, her marksmanship scores had risen dramatically, suggesting her early struggles had more to do with inexperience than lack of ability -- and given what she'd said about her first pistol, Garrus wasn't terribly surprised. 

There were six psych evals in the collection: one at enlistment, one at six months, then regular annual reports beginning at one year after enlistment. The enlistment report noted that Shepard showed signs of fatigue and stress, but that she seemed level-headed and offered nuanced answers when asked to describe what she thought humanity's role on the galactic stage should be. At six months, the reporter wrote that Shepard seemed somewhat reticent to join her fellow soldiers in many of their leisure activities, preferring to read and study when on base and to visit local museums and cultural centers when off. Though she'd shown no interest in promotion, her psychological make-up suggested she'd never be happy as a run-of-the-mill grunt, and the reporter recommended a promotion as she graduated basic training, citing her high intelligence test scores and significant improvement in combat training. 

At one year, the evals reported that Shepard was handling the stresses of leadership, maintaining that level-headedness she'd shown during her in-take and developing a sense of comradeship with her squad. At the end of year two, Shepard had a demonstrated tendency to hang back during combat, collect as much intel on a situation as she could, then direct her squad with precision, though she had reportedly taken the first death of a soldier under her command very hard, and the reporter cautioned that Shepard seemed likely to hide this kind of emotional turmoil in favor of maintaining the even-keel persona that had gotten her through so far. The year three eval included a debriefing transcript with then-gunnery chief Shepard explaining to a major why she had lied to a lieutenant in the field as her unit had taken out the primary distribution facility of a slaver ring on a human colony world. 

  
  


_HB: How did you know the warehouse was a trap?_

_JS: The guards we encountered at the gate house were carrying a variety of rifle makes, but all previous reports said this group usually carried ERCS or Rosenkov. It made me wonder if these guards were just poorly-paid wanna-be mercs picked up somewhere local rather than actually being part of the operation. And if that was the case, the much better equipped troops would be waiting for us. Luring us into the heart of the complex where, ostensibly, the slaves would be held then flanking us seemed like the most obvious tactic, but less likely because it was so obvious. Letting us actually start moving slaves out to waiting extraction vehicles before hitting us from rooflines of surrounding buildings would cause a great deal of chaos and split our attention between taking out the shooters and protecting the civilians. It was a less obvious choice since it would likely result in the slavers losing some of their merchandise, but it would make it more likely that they could take out our entire unit and remove the still intact slaves before backup could arrive._

_HB: So why not explain this to Lieutenant Starker? Surely she would have understood your concerns._

_JS: I raised the issue of the suspect rifles with the lieutenant, but she asserted that this was an indication that they were not expecting us and had therefore not left their best men to guard the facility, which admittedly lined up with the intel we had received prior to hitting the ground._

_HB: So when you entered the holding area, you lied to the lieutenant about a possible infection._

_JS: Yes. Lieutenant Stark seemed wary of bio-agents in general and was likely to follow quarantine protocols to a T, which would include additional protections on the civilians as they were moved to vehicles._

_HB: Which saved many lives when the slavers did open fire._

_JS: Yes sir._

  
  


This exchange had not made it into the official report on the incident, which only noted that Gunnery Chief Shepard had been mistaken in her identification of a possible contagion, but the psych evaluation had noted that this exchange indicated that Shepard paid as much attention to managing her superiors as those under her command and argued that while her motives were seemingly altruistic in this case, she should be watched for future signs of manipulating her COs for her own gains. The year four eval dismissed the previous reporter's paranoia, writing that Operations Chief Shepard, while occasionally massaging the details, had done nothing to suggest she had anything other than the survival of her team and the well-being of civilians at heart. 

Then, Akuze had happened. 

Garrus had heard the official news releases regarding the incident, though the reports had been somewhat vague. A human pioneer team had gone dark. A unit of marines had been sent to investigate and found the colony completely empty. In the night they'd been attacked by thresher maws and only one had survived. 

The vids of Shepard's debriefing painted a much more graphic picture. She'd been nearly comatose for the better part of a week after her extraction, and even after she seemed fairly coherent otherwise, her answers regarding what had happened on the planet's surface had been piece-meal and confused. In the first video, Shepard was still wearing a brace on her left arm and looked way too thin. She sat up in her hospital bed with a team of Alliance officers around her. Rear Admiral Hackett seemed to be the one leading the questioning. "Walk us through what happened," he asked, sounding firm but not harsh. 

Shepard visibly swallowed, but her voice still sounded rough and hoarse when she spoke. "The shuttles landed at around 1425. Lieutenant Federov ordered us to sweep the colony, look for survivors or any sign of what had happened. Charlie Team got the central complexes…" She trailed off, eyes unfocused. 

"But you didn't find anything," Hackett prodded. 

"No," Shepard continued, "no one. In the research complex, the cafeteria had all these trays of food sitting out, like people had gotten ready for lunch, then just disappeared." She suddenly looked up to zero in on Hackett's face. "You don't think it was the rapture, do you?" 

Hackett looked confused, glancing around the gathered staff until an aide cleared her throat. "It's a fringe religious belief, sir," she said. "Some believe that God will remove the righteous from the Earth before an apocalypse." 

Hackett heaved a sigh. "No, Shepard, I don't think it was the rapture. Slavers are much more likely." 

"Oh," Shepard said, looking down. "That's too bad." 

"So you found nothing in the camp. What happened then?" 

It took Shepard a moment to get started again, forehead drawn in to make a vertical line in the skin. "It was starting to get dark, so Federov ordered us to camp at different points around the perimeter. Alpha Squad was north-west, Bravo was north-east, and Charlie to the south. Three hour watches for each squad through the night cycle, with sitrep reports to the lieutenant or 2nd lieutenant every hour." 

"And where were the officers?" Hackett asked. 

"Federov was in Alpha camp, and Nguyen was in Bravo." Shepard swallowed hard again. "I was ranking officer in Charlie." 

"Alright, so you set up watches, got everyone settled in." Hackett almost sounded like he was coaxing her. "Then what happened?" 

Shepard tilted her head back to face the ceiling. "There was an explosion from Bravo. I tried to raise them on comms, but comms were out." 

"What time was this?" Hackett interrupted. 

Shepard's eyes searched above her. "Kareem came stumbling out in his boxers," she said, voice airy and distant, "and Rodgers was right behind him in the same state. They were probably in the middle of a quickie after their watch, so between 0100 and 0200, I'd guess." 

The reference to two soldiers engaging in sexual activities while in the field produced several frowns among the gathered officers and a few shuffled feet. Garrus snorted. The soldiers had been awake and quick to respond, hadn't they? He'd always had a vague sense that Alliance regs were ridiculous and it was only confirmed now. 

"I ordered everyone to suit up and get ready to move," Shepard went on, oblivious to the reaction her words had provoked. "Chan's team took point, Hernandez's at drag, and I was in the middle with Kato's. With comms out, we had to stay close, and it was about ten minutes before we got eyes on Bravo." She paused, swallowed again, but her eyes didn't leave the ceiling. "Everything was on fire -- it looked like their Mako had been the source of the explosion -- and the first thresher maw was on the north side of the camp, wreaking havoc. Most of what was left of the team was on that side of camp, firing whatever they could at the thresher in front of them, when the second one popped up in the middle of everything. I had my team take cover on the south side of camp to see what we could do about the second one and asked for a volunteer to run to Alpha camp and give them our sitrep. Corporal Toombs stepped up and took off, but…" she trailed off and closed her eyes, face spasming with grief. "He didn't get more than half a click before a thresher came up right underneath him. We could just see it in the moonlight. I don't know if it was the one who had been to the north or if it was a newcomer, but it flanked around behind my team and… everything just went to shit." 

Hackett didn't press as Shepard took a few heaving breaths, though he did eye the monitor with her vital signs, which had begun to beep more rapidly. Instead, he waited for her to continue on her own. 

"I'm not really sure what happened at that point. I think I took a blow to the head, because when I came to I was under the remnants of a supply crate. It was still dark, but things were quiet. The quakes under the ground suggested the threshers were still around, though. I'd read about how on Tuchanka, krogan would use big drums to attract the threshers, how they hunted primarily through sound and sensation, so I thought maybe if I didn't do anything that seemed drum-like, didn't sound to rhythmic, I might be able to trick them into thinking I wasn't a living thing for them to attack. I started crawling around what was left of the camp on my belly, really slowly, checking bodies for survivors. Most people were dead or too far gone for me to do anything with the threshers still around, but I found Ashanka and Janson hiding under some wreckage and Hernandez was injured but said she was good enough to crawl. I decided our best chance was to head back to the LZ and wait for someone to come down to find out why the comms had gone silent, so I told them my idea about tricking the threshers and we started crawling in the dark, spread out far enough so that a thresher couldn't get us all in one go but close enough to call if something came up." Shepard had settled into a kind of numb recitation at this point, though her vitals still looked spiky and panicked. "I think Hernandez bled out within the first klick. After the second, I felt a strong quake, like a thresher was right under the surface below me. Ashanka felt it too, panicked, got up and started running toward the LZ. Janson followed suit, but the thresher…" Another pause. Another thick swallow. Another jump in heart rate. 

"I remember getting to the LZ. The sun was just coming up. They told me later that I was conscious enough when the Kodiak got there to warn them about the threshers, but I don't remember it…" 

Her voice was starting to tighten, and this time Hackett intervened, gesturing to someone offscreen, who moved in with a syringe and injected it into a port on Shepard's arm. "Alright, soldier," Hackett said, "just rest now." 

The reports said that during the next week, Shepard had alternated between states of near catatonia and frantic rage and grief, breaking supplies and screaming at staff. Once they got her sleeping properly, though, her moods evened out, and she was discharged into a long-term rehab center, where she was placed into the care of a PTSD counselor. It was in those reports that Garrus finally found Corporal Emily Banks, who had been in a romantic relationship with Shepard for the six months leading up to Akuze. She had been in Alpha Camp, and Shepard had been plagued with guilt for choosing to head for the LZ instead of the other camp to find her lover. Four weeks after the disaster, the notes in Shepard's file were debating whether she needed to be Cat-6ed or if she might still be able to do desk job or perhaps go to R &D for the remainder of her tour. 

Garrus stretched his neck as he closed the file and checked his chronometer. He had enough time to at least look at the second set of documents before he needed to get some sleep. Shifting, around on the cushions he had thrown in the floor of the Mako to get more comfortable, he opened Anderson's second file. 

It was one long document: Anderson's notes on Shepard's childhood with links to things like her service record, news stories, and police reports. One Jane Smith had been dropped at a YMCA (Garrus had tried to look up what that was, but had received conflicting accounts) in Atlanta. She'd been passed around to several foster families in the course of her childhood, and her records with child services reported everything from "intelligent" and "mild-mannered" to "strong-willed," "stubborn," and "hostile to authority figures." Anderson had concluded that at least one if not more of the foster parents had been exploiting the foster care system to make extra money, while another had later been convicted of child abuse, largely due to information turned over to the police by a small-time information broker who went by the name "Johnny Mocker," which was, Anderson discovered, the pseudonym Shepard had adopted on the streets. 

_Johnny Mocker?_ Garrus thought, remembering how Shepard had refused to talk about it over dinner. _What's so bad about that?_

After running away at fifteen, Shepard had been taken under the wing of Elsie Kindred, who made her living informing the local crime lords and mob bosses on each other's movements and who would willingly spread false information for a certain fee. Kindred had managed to keep herself in business by organizing other small time brokers to verify her false intel for a percentage, but Kindred's operation was undercut by a new player, Athena, who Anderson suspected was responsible for hastening Kindred's death, even though the old woman was already dying from cancer. Kindred's former clients had no reason to believe that her protege -- who had been described as an old black man with gold teeth, a little girl with enough gene mods to make her a deadly hand-to-hand opponent, a pretty young woman with a smart mouth and a bird tattoo, and a bald white guy with a heavy accent and a very big knife -- wouldn't play the same way Kindred had, but Johnny Mocker had quickly demonstrated that they had different ideas. Less interested in making money or maintaining the stability of the Southern States underground, Mocker had sold intel to whoever might make the most mischief, including bounty hunters, police, and outside groups looking to get a foothold in the Atlanta area. At some point, Mocker had been absorbed into Athena's operation, but when Athena's people had determined that Mocker was passing along choice intel to ATL PD along with selling it to the highest bidder -- including choice intel on Athena themselves and their most valuable partner, the Tenth Street Reds -- Mocker had been chased out of town and into the loving arms of the Alliance, shedding the moniker in favor of becoming Jane Shepard. 

Anderson's reasons for diving into the operation chief's past became clear when Garrus opened the third file, which started with Anderson's official request to have Shepard transferred under his command. The then-major had been working to put together an infiltration team to collect information on human colonies in the Terminus systems, a pet project he had been trying to get through top brass for a while. Jane Shepard was a prime candidate for the kind of undercover op he wanted to pull: embedding an Alliance agent in a Terminus mercenary group to gather intel on the ins and outs of Terminus workings. Anderson's request had been met with a gruff response that barely covered the fact that Shepard's current CO couldn't wait to be rid of the operations chief who was causing him so much grief as he tried to figure out what the hell to do with her. 

There was a vid of the initial meeting between Shepard and Anderson in Shepard's cell of the rehab facility. At least, Garrus thought it looked like a cell; the room was small with a bed, a single chair at a desk with a terminal, and no windows. When Anderson had entered, Shepard had stayed in bed, lounging against the headboard, a guarded look on her face. 

"Hello, Shepard," Anderson said. "I'm Major David Anderson, and I'm here to offer you a chance to work in Special Operations." 

Shepard snorted loudly. "What, you think I've seen enough death at this point that I'll just happily do your wetwork for you?" 

Garrus paused to consult his omnitool. 

_Wetwork: Alliance slang for tasks considered morally ambiguous, including assassination, torture, and infiltration missions requiring the elimination of both military and non-military targets_. 

Garrus grimaced. Sounded familiar. 

"Not wetwork," Anderson answered, voice level in the face of Shepard's clear disdain. "I'd like to use your expertise from before you joined up, from when you went by Johnny Mocker." 

Shepard narrowed her eyes at him, but she sat up a little straighter. "You know, I was really happy thinking I'd never hear that name again." 

Anderson shrugged, just a little slow lift of the shoulders instead of the hard bounce Garrus was used to seeing. "Doesn't change the fact that you've got a skill set I want to exploit." 

"What's the mission?" Shepard asked, gesturing for Anderson to have a seat, like she was the ranking officer in the room. 

But Anderson did sit. "I'm trying to get a large scale information network in the Terminus systems going. I want to embed Alliance agents in mercenary groups to get a better understanding of how power moves out there." 

"Mercenary groups probably means wetwork," Shepard countered. 

"I've found a few that are on the up-and-up, trying to provide some measure of protection for colonists against pirates, slavers, and the like." Anderson sighed. "Look, I'm going to level with you. You're about a week away from either getting quietly Cat-6ed or ending up in an R &D lab. You're a hero, but you're also not doing much to convince your therapist or your CO that you're fit for field duty." He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and peered into Shepard's face. "You got dealt a shit hand on Akuze, and you're dealing with it as well as anyone would, but the Alliance is taking a lot of bad press on this one and they either need you to act like a hero or get out of sight. I'm offering you a chance to slide out of the limelight and do some meaningful work without having to take charge of other soldiers' lives for a little while." 

Shepard's eyes seem to light a little. "So it's solo work?" 

"Just you and some data drops." Anderson grimaced a little. "It also means no backup if your cover gets blown, but I think you're too smart for that." 

"I dunno, Athena almost got me." 

"Well, the cop you were working with was an idiot. He never even realized his partner was in Athena's pocket." 

Shepard cursed. "I knew she had someone in the department." Her legs jiggled in an agitated fashion. 

"No use worrying about it now," Anderson chided. 

"Yeah…" Shepard seemed to rein herself under control. "So, SpecOps. That means N training, right?" 

Anderson nodded. "You'll be back on Earth for six weeks, minimum, then back with me for some more specialized training before we send you out." 

"And you really think I could get in with some good mercenaries instead of some bad ones?" 

"I happen to have some reliable ex-Alliance buddies who have made recommendations." 

"Yeah, alright, as long as it gets me the hell out of here." 

Shepard was officially processed as having been Cat-6ed, then quietly moved to N training on Earth. In the next records Garrus had, she was an N2 and learning all about the latest hacking techniques with an Alliance specialist en route to Omega. There was a thorough accounting of her physiology, including blood type, fingerprints, retinal scan, dental records, and distinguishing marks which, interestingly enough, included a tattoo of a bird. Garrus studied the holo, twisting it this way and that, before asking his omnitool to identify it. 

_Northern Mockingbird: A type of_ avianus- _analogue. A common songbird of Earth's North American continent measuring 20.5 to 28 cm including a tail almost as long as the body. Wingspan ranges between 31 and 38 cm. Known for its ability to mimic the sounds of other birds, animals, and humans._

_A mocker_ , Garrus thought. He wondered vaguely if Shepard still had the tattoo if she hated the nickname so much now. 

Anderson had tapped three possible mercenary outfits that were currently looking for new recruits; Shepard had ended up with Dusk-to-Dawn, a human-led multirace company that primarily tracked raiding parties after they hit colony worlds, should anyone call and offer payment. She had apparently done well, providing a great deal of information about slaver movements, methods, and tactics before quietly bowing out of the company when they were absorbed into the Blue Suns. 

There was a short gap, about eight weeks, before she boarded the turian ship _Careo_ with an N4 designation and shorter hair. Garrus was fairly familiar with outfits like the _Careo_ ; often turians who hadn't done well under the Hierarchy would leave for the Terminus systems while still maintaining a fundamentally turian sense of law-and-order. The _Careo_ 's crew was basically a strike team for hire, answering colonial distress calls and defending against invaders. The reports were sporadic but detailed and insightful, with careful readings of turian para-military culture alongside her assessments of the various major players in the Terminus systems. 

Then Anderson had been promoted and pulled off the intel mission, and Shepard had left the _Careo_ to follow Anderson. By the time of her next report, she was an N6 and was sometimes working solo and sometimes back in charge of a team, a small one made up of other Ns. One early psych eval noted that her time on the turian ship had left her with distinctive xenophilic tendencies -- Garrus snorted; only the worst kind of human would describe a better understand of another race as "xenophilic" -- and also suggested that her acute anxiety over taking a squad should disqualify her from said position. Anderson had disagreed, and his faith had not been misplaced; Shepard's team had very high success rates and very few casualties, though the specifics for almost all the missions had been redacted. She seemed to keep with her tried-and-true method: hang back, get all the details, then create a plan. In her debriefings, though, it became clear that she usually had several plans to choose from at any given time, and according to the reports from the therapist Anderson had her seeing regularly, she would forego sleep to obsess over worst case scenarios and possible solutions. She had panic attacks, but only after the mission was successfully completed. "It's been noted in several of her evaluations," the therapist wrote, "that Shepard experiences higher levels of sensory input than most humans, the so-called 'highly sensitive person' effect. This has no doubt augmented her success in the field. However, this kind of heightened awareness likely results in an even deeper crash following the adrenaline high of combat. Combine this with the fact that Shepard reports regularly revisiting the events of the day before she sleeps, an involuntary practice that allows her to process all that sensory data -- Shepard is likely reliving all the near-misses of the field while already in a state of heightened anxiety." The therapist had prescribed some sleeping aids but admitted that Shepard probably didn't use them. Then, after a year, these reports tapered off, and instead annual evaluations reported that Shepard was a well-adjusted commander, that she coped with her stress productively through exercise and self-directed study, and that she had developed the separation between her work and her private life necessary for a special forces agent. 

And that was it. That was everything the Alliance could give him Commander Jane Shepard. 

It left him with a somewhat empty feeling, like all the documents should have given him an intimate glimpse into the commander, but the previous evening, with her dipping her _furca_ in his stew and popping it in her mouth -- that had told him more about her than anything in these files, about her fearlessness and sense of adventure. Still there were some lessons to be gleaned, he supposed. Lying to a superior to get them to do what she wanted? Still Shepard. Panicking after a successful op? Still Shepard. Showing xenophilic tendencies? Still Shepard. Insomnia? Still Shepard. 

Garrus put the files away, stripped down to his hide, and nestled down, pulling a blanket over his body. In a couple of days, they'd hit Feros and he'd keep an eye on Shepard, try to watch for all those things her files said she did that he had never quite noticed before. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Garrus thinks Shepard is fearless. Ha. Hahaha. Ha.
> 
> Also, the "highly sensitive person" effect is a real thing that has been documented in lots of higher order mammals.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, looking at the blank screen: I'll just do a little write-up of the Feros mission. Get a little action in. It'll be fun.
> 
> Me, 10,000 words later, when Jane starts ranting because her non-human teammates' translators will not properly translate her obscenities: OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE.
> 
>  
> 
> GLOSSARY:
> 
> kava: dextro coffee (because it's impossible for a species to attain any kind of advanced science and culture without caffeine) (Chromatism)
> 
> torin: turian male over the age of majority (MizDirected)

"This briefing is going to be short," Jane said, "because we don't have a lot to go on." _And because I desperately need some coffee_ , she added in her head. She been up late, going over all the most recent scans of Zhu's Hope and the ExoGeni facility. Something in her gut said they'd be seeing both. "We'll be setting down at a human colony called Zhu's Hope. Reports are that they've been under attack from geth for the last ten days. Before that, there were reports of strange sightings going back about four weeks. Every time someone sets down that isn't ExoGeni staff, they aren't heard from again." She swept her eyes around the room. "We're going to break that curse." 

The eyes that looked back at her were alert and determined. _Good. Need them to be on top of things._ "We're going to be working in two teams for this, though we might make some changes once we get a sitrep on the ground," she went on, leaning against one of the QEC stations, the one that most recently held Councillor Sparatus. "Alpha team will be Vakarian, Williams, and Dr. T'Soni with me. Alenko is heading up Bravo with Wrex and Tali. Once we touch down, Bravo will wait on the ship at ready, while Alpha takes stock of the situation." She sighed. "At the very least, I'm expecting scared colonists in need of food, water, and medical help, and I'm authorizing all of _Normandy_ 's non-essential supplies to be off-loaded as needed. Any questions?" 

No one had any, so Jane dismissed them and stalked toward the mess hall, where a very full pot of delicious liquid caffeine waited for her. _Alenko is a good LT_ , she thought vaguely as he passed her a mug. She didn't like feeling this fatigued before a mission, but if the coffee didn't cut through the fog, a couple of stims might. She sat at the table and was a little surprised when Vakarian sat across from her. The mess was otherwise empty; even Alenko had taken his own mug toward the medbay, probably to get his peremptory migraine treatment from Chakwas. She nodded at the turian, who had a cup of _kava_ in his hands, and said, "Everything alright?" 

"Yeah, Commander," Vakarian answered. He shuffled the cup on the tabletop and Jane opted to focus on long, hot sips of coffee instead of trying to figure out what he wanted. Eventually, he said, "I got the files. Went through them." 

"Good," Jane said, holding the mug in front of her mouth. "Anderson give you any lip about not sharing Alliance secrets with the Hierarchy?" 

"No, he was polite and informative." 

Jane hummed in acknowledgement, thinking not for the first time that she should really see about getting her aural implants adjusted to detect turian subvocals again. A translator wouldn't work with them, but at one point she'd been able to gauge at least a general sense of tone. The drawback had been that she'd lost some hearing on the higher range, the kinds of hums and squeals that could tell you that an engine was going to blow in two weeks; keeping both the highs and lows had given her unbelievable headaches. On a ship full of turians, she'd decided that the lows were more useful, but once she was back with a human crew, she'd had the implants adjusted back to standard. Still, it would have been nice if she had some idea of why Vakarian was bringing this up. 

He didn't seem inclined to enlighten her, just sat there, so Jane decided that maybe it would be fine to just drink their drinks in silence, hopefully one that would become companionable. The coffee cleared some of the fog from her head, enough that she thought the natural adrenaline from the field would suffice for the rest. There were still a couple of hours before they hit Feros, and she tried to decide what would be the best use of her time. Vakarian saved her the effort. "I was looking at my hardsuit footage from Noveria," he said, "and I noticed how much your Mantis jumps when you fire. I know you're going for the extra stopping power with the longer barrel, but I think I can adjust the weight so the barrel won't jump so high without the recoil hitting your shoulder any harder." His mandibles fluttered weakly with uncertainty. "If you'd like like me to…" 

Jane blinked at him. "That is a small miracle that I would like to see." 

Hours later, Jane walked out into the Zhu's Hope docks with a recently refitted sniper rifle and Alpha team. A human waited at the end of the pier, and Jane kept her weapons holstered and her gait easy. Vakarian moved up about a pace ahead of her -- _Such a turian_ , she thought -- while Williams and Liara trailed behind. When they got within hearing distance, the man greeted them. "Thank God someone finally came. Fai Dan wants to see you immediately." 

"Who's Fai Dan?" Jane asked, something about the man's demeanor putting her on edge. 

"He's the leader of the colony," the man said, turning as though the matter was settled. "Now fol--" 

He was cut off by a bullet through his chest, followed by a second and a third. 

Jane rolled to the ground, hearing Vakarian hiss, "Geth!" as she moved. Taking cover behind the pier's short wall, she peeked around the corner. One of those big fuckers, plus a few troopers and snipers. The troopers were already barreling in, and the destroyer wouldn't be far behind. "Focus on the troopers," she called to Williams, who had found her own bit of cover. "You too Liara." The asari was already snapping a small group of shots in the right direction while her biotic field began to glow. "Vakarian," Jane continued her orders and fiddling with her omnitool, "on three, we're going to double overload the big one, then hit him right in the head, yeah?" 

"Roger, Commander." Vakarian's digits were moving in his own 'tool, and he popped his head out of cover to eye the distance. 

"Three…" Jane eyed the distance herself, then prepared to sabotage the geth's rocket launcher as soon as he fried. "Two…one!" 

There was a bright flash, but Jane didn't hesitate, banking on the hope that the target would be rooted to the spot as she aimed her sabotage. As the launcher exploded, Vakarian took a couple of careful shots, putting the destroyer down. 

Jane took a look around. Williams had the last trooper in hand, but the red lasers on her chest were a bad sign. "Liara, lift those snipers," Jane snapped. "Vakarian, you take right, I'll take left." 

A second later, a purple wash of energy flowed down the pier and two geth rose in the air only to be picked off. Jane scanned the area again. 

"I think we're clear, ma'am," Williams reported, confirming Jane's assessment. 

"Everybody good?" she asked. She heard confirmation from each member of her team. "Alright, Vakarian, take point. Williams, you're drag." 

They moved smoothly into what were some very well-preserved ruins, encountering a couple of geth stalkers on a stairway but otherwise meeting no resistance until they reached the outskirts of the colony. A gray-haired woman manning the foremost barrier only glanced at them before she said, "Fai Dan is at the other end of the colony. Just keep moving through." 

"I'm afraid the man who met us at the docks is dead," Jane told her, holstering her side arm. 

The woman shrugged. "He's not the first. Probably won't be the last." 

The team made their way through the camp. Bodies lay out in the open, suggesting that they hadn't had time between assaults to care for their dead. Vakarian's mandibles were pulled up very tight; if the smell was bad to her, it was probably terrible to him. At the same time, a few engineers seemed focused on basic infrastructure systems, and if people could be spared for that, surely they could be spared to move the dead somewhere out of the way… 

Jane pushed the detail to the back of her mind as they hit the other side of the camp where a middle-aged man with roughly Asian features and a young, well-armed woman were standing watch over another staircase. "Fai Dan?" she asked, looking at the man. 

"They finally sent someone!" the man exclaimed, eyeing her Alliance gear and N7 designation. "We've been waiting for days." He gestured to the woman. "This is our chief of security, Arcelia Silva Martinez." 

"What can you tell me about the situation?" she asked, looking between the two of them. 

The security chief answered. "We're overrun with geth! What the hell else do you need to know?" She snorted. "They send one damn frigate to fight a full invasion." As if to underscore her words, shots flew out of the tunnel before them and sizzled against Jane's shields. "Geth in the tower!" Martinez yelled. 

"We can't let them get to the heart of the colony!" Fai Dan responded. 

Vakarian had already moved into cover on one side of the doorway, and Williams was on the other, assault rifle firing on an approaching trooper. Jane shoved Liara down next to Martinez, letting her shields take a beating as she popped off a few shots into another trooper's flashlight head. It went down in a sputter of white fluid, but there was another right behind it. Jane ducked down as Liara popped up to hit it with a stasis. She heard a small explosion and peeked above the barrier to find the doorway clear. "See any more?" she called. 

"Negative, Commander," said Williams. 

"I see movement the next level up," Vakarian answered. 

"Alright, let's move in, people," Jane said, letting Williams and Vakarian through before she followed with Liara, the biotic glowing with stored power. Just before they started up the staircase, Jane called for them to hold, stepping around to eye around a pillar. Like Vakarian had said, there was movement, but the angle was no good to get a shot in, and there was no way to tell how many were waiting up there. "Ease up the wall," she directed, waving them around her. "I'm going to cross the doorway and see what's up." 

As the rest of the team climbed the stairs, Jane sprinted up them, dashing past the door, taking a couple of shots on her shields and spying three troopers with a couple of drones. Flattening herself on the far wall as her shields recharged, she told her team what she'd seen. Vakarian crossed the doorway next, overloading one of the troopers and catching a drone by happenstance, then joined her against the wall as Williams leaned out of her cover and finished of the fried trooper. 

A little more shooting and the distinct eezo smell of Liara's biotics and they were moving down a short corridor and up another set of stairs. At the top, a wall blocked their view, so Jane motioned for the team to take cover as she peeked around… and immediately attracted the attention of a drone. Jerking back, she said quickly, "Drones and cover just inside." She prepped an overload, then spun around the corner once more, unleashing the burst of energy into the nearest drone and hearing the clatter of assault rifles behind her. 

For a long minute, it was back to basics: find your target, get in a few shots, take cover. The snipers were the worst, but Liara had gotten good at lifting them out of their cover, and once they were in the open, they went down easy. Williams and Vakarian had just taken out the final trooper when Jane heard a noise that sent her stomach up her throat. "Cover!" she ordered. "Now!" 

From her place crouched behind a slab of rock, the commander watched the geth ship hover over what had once been a roof, dropping fresh troops. "We don't move until that ship does," she hissed to her team, knowing that even a little drop ship could cut through their shields with whatever weaponry it had on board. She glanced at her combat scanner. Jammed. Unsurprisingly. 

The ship stood guard until the new units had unfolded and oriented themselves, then darted away. Bullets began peppering the wall behind her as well as the rocks her team hid behind. "Alright," she said, loading a fresh set of heat sinks into her pistol, "let's do this smart." 

Doing it smart lasted all of ten seconds. There was a new set of snipers, troopers moving around the right flank, and a pair of destroyers. She signaled Vakarian to pull the same trick from the docks with one of them, but that only drew the other's attention to her, and it loped toward her. Jane backpedaled as fast as she could, taking a few shots at the head as her overload charged up again, but by the time she had taken down its shields with a big energy blast, it was only 20 meters away. She hit with a sabotage, exploding the rifle in its grip, then sank bullet after bullet into it as it closed, whispering _fuck_ under her breath with each one. 

It was nonfunctional by the time it hit her, but that didn't stop her helmet from cracking hard against the floor as she went down underneath the pile of scrap metal. Her vision swam, and she struggled to breathe, but as things came back into focus, she heard Williams grunt in pain in her ear. She didn't so much turn her head as flop it in the other direction, just to see one of the troopers bearing down on the gunnery chief. Without thinking, she lifted her pistol, which was miraculously still in her hand, and fired, hitting the trooper's "head" and splattering Williams with white fluid. 

_Cum shot,_ Jane thought fuzzily, then mentally slapped herself in an attempt to restore some commanderliness to her mind. She at least managed to reach over and slap the medigel button on her armor, and as she found her breath, she gasped, "Sitrep?" 

Vakarian answered. "We're clear, Commander." 

"Oh thank God," she groaned. "Can someone get this fucker off of me?" 

A few moments later the weight on her chest and lower extremities was lifting. "You know," said Vakarian, "if you wanted to sit this one out, you could have just said so." 

Jane scooted her body backward until she was clear of the machine, so the _torin_ could drop it, but she didn't try to sit up. Not yet. "Gotta save face," she wheezed. 

Vakarian kneeled down beside her and hit her medigel button again before hitting the switch to raise her visor. "You okay?" he asked, in a way that said what he really meant was "how badly are you hurt?" while letting her save a little face. 

"Just had the air knocked out of me," she answered. She took a deep breath a winced just a little. Didn't feel like any ribs were broken -- all of the weight had been distributed pretty evenly across her body -- but she'd feel better when the painkiller kicked in. She raised her omnitool to check the read-out from her medical interface. No red flashing text. Good sign. "Williams?" she called. 

"Here, ma'am," came a voice from her periphery. "Took a couple to the chest but they didn't get through the armor." 

"Liara?" 

"I am uninjured," said the asari calmly, as though she waltzed through firefights with geth a couple times year. 

Jane hauled her torso up until she was sitting with her elbows on her knees. For a second she hurt all over, then the drugs started working and the pain eased. "And you?" she asked the turian who was still at her side. 

He snorted. "I'm fine," he drawled. "Think you can walk?" 

"Yeah, yeah," she asserted, "just give me a hand up." 

Jane felt better back on her feet, though she kept a hand on the wall as they headed back down the stairs. Vakarian glanced over his shoulder at her a couple of times, but she waved him off. So maybe she had a little concussion and some bruised ribs. Hadn't stopped her before. 

Back at the colony, Fai Dan and Martinez were still manning their barrier, though they lowered their rifles when Jane's team emerged. "All clear up there," she told them. 

Fai Dan was visibly relieved. "Thank you for your help, Commander…" 

"Commander Jane Shepard," Jane said. "Now help me find what the geth are after, and we'll all get out of here alive." 

"We don't know what they're after," Fai Dan said, going on the defensive. "They came, they attacked us, that's all we know." 

Martinez snorted. "They may have been slowed, but they'll be back. They always come back." 

"Any idea how they're getting in?" Jane asked. "Looked like that group was dropped from a troop carrier." 

"They're coming up from the tunnels," Fai Dan answered, leaning heavily against a piece of rubble. "They've set up a transmitter down there to allow them to navigate the tunnel system from the ExoGeni building." 

"So if we take out the transmitter, you'd get some peace," Jane concluded. 

Fai Dan inclined his head. "Pretty much." 

"How about infrastructure?" Vakarian broke in. "Food, water…" 

"Or we could evacuate you," Jane went on. "The _Normandy_ isn't huge, but we could airlift you out." 

"The geth fighters are too dangerous," Fai Dan snapped, "and I won't be driven off this world. It is our home." His face softened. "There's a chance for growth here that is simply not available on other worlds." 

"Alright," Jane said, deliberately making her tone soothing; the guy didn't quite seem all there. "What do you need to help you get back on your feet?" 

"We need the geth out of those tunnels," Martinez said. 

"And more mundane things," Fai Dan added, "like food, water, and power. But you'd have to talk to the people overseeing those things in the colony for more details." 

Jane nodded. "We'll see what we can do, then." 

As they walked back into the heart of the outpost, Jane said softly to her people. "Thoughts, anyone?" 

Liara spoke first. "While these ruins are definitely Prothean, I see nothing to suggest the any caches of advanced technology or artifacts. No clues as to what the geth are searching for." 

Jane nodded. "Williams?" 

The marine shrugged. "Kinda get a weird vibe from Fai Dan. I mean, who wouldn't want to get their people out of a shit show like this?" 

"It could just be the shock of the attack," Vakarian cut in. "Wanting to dig in to protect your home isn't the _least_ rational reaction." Jane looked up at him and he dipped his head sideways in a shrug. "Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep an eye on him though." 

Jane nodded, stopping next to a frigate parked in the middle of the colony. "Alright, let's spread out. Liara, poke around a little, look for more Prothean stuff. Williams and Vakarian, talk to people, try figure out what they need to get up and running. We'll meet back here in fifteen." 

While Vakarian headed toward the only other non-human they'd seen, a salarian, and Williams entered one of the housing units, Jane turned to the woman working at the frigate's controls. A couple of questions told her that this was a member of one of those crews that came down and never went back up, that the frigate was probably just scrap metal at this point, and that this woman had somehow decided that Zhu's Hope was her home too. It was an oft-repeated theme: this was their home, and any time Jane probed further, she was directed back to Fai Dan. So, she handed out the ration bars and medigel packs she had on her, found out what was needed to get the water supply going again from a very grumpy engineer, and rejoined her team. "Back to the ship," she told them without preamble. "If you've got medigel packs, water, and ration bars on you -- not you, Vakarian -- drop them at the front barrier." 

Once they were safely out of earshot, Jane said, "Okay, what did you hear?" 

"The salarian wants to stay, Shepard," Vakarian blurted. "I mean, I can understand the humans, it's their colony after all, but the salarian?" 

"You hear the same thing, Williams?" Jane asked. "Everybody want to stay?" 

"Yes, ma'am," Williams said. "The woman fixing the power -- she wasn't interested in just rigging something temporary up. They're looking to rebuild already, before we've even the geth of the planet. 

Jane nodded and tapped her comm implant. "Joker, tell Bravo team to meet us on the pier, and tell them to bring a resupply of medigel, water, and rations for us." 

"Roger that, Commander." 

Jane picked up her pace down the stairs, nausea not related to her head trauma building in her gut. "Liara, did you see anything that looked out of place? Anything that looked alien?" 

"No, Shepard," Liara answered. "Is there anything in particular you think might be there?" 

Jane bite at the inside of her lip. "Benezia said that _Sovereign_ was responsible for the indoctrination, but that doesn't mean that other tech couldn't be used in the same way." 

"You think they're indoctrinated?" the asari gasped. 

"I don't know," Jane said firmly, rounding the corner and feeling a little easier seeing Bravo team standing by. "But better safe than sorry, yeah?" 

Alenko was at the head of the group, alert. "Something wrong, Commander?" he asked as soon as she was close enough for him to not have to shout. 

"Not sure, Lieutenant," Jane said. "Could be traumatized colonists, could be something more sinister." She took the supplies he held out and began storing them in the various pouches in her armor. "We're going to change of the teams a little," she said to all of them. "Williams, you're staying with Bravo. Tali, you're coming with us." She turned back to Alenko. "Williams can brief you on the situation, and if things go up shit creek, having another human instead of an alien may help people stay more sane. In any case, your primary objective is to protect the _Normandy_ and protect yourselves. Everything else is secondary. You got it, LT?" 

"Yes ma'am," he said, and his gaze and hand were both steady. Jane nodded. She looked back at her new team. "Everyone got their stuff?" She heard affirmatives. "Let's move out, then." 

Shepard briefed Tali on their way back through the outpost, not even pausing to say anything to Fai Dan as they went by and down into the tunnels, which looked like more of the same Prothean architecture, all gray stone and odd angles. The geth had planned against an incursion like this, with little pockets of snipers and troopers, including those red bastards with the rockets, well-protected and with no way to get around them. There were bridges across the very long drop-off to their right, but Jane had no interest in seeing the other side before she could be sure there was nothing left over here to flank them. Things were going fine -- duck behind cover, shoot a few geth, find a water valve -- until they ventured into a side room and Vakarian, who was on point, roared something that her translator could not interpret but could only be absolutely filthy. Jane rushed in behind him to see a pack of varren charging down an incline and began unloading her gun for all she was worth. Several seem distracted by the turian, given how loud he was being, but a few veered off for Jane. She put down one, but her heat sinks were exhausted and the second one managed to get right up on her. She stomped a boot onto its snout, hearing a satisfying crack but not dropping the beast. Luckily Liara was just behind her and put a bullet between its eyes before it could get back up. 

Jane reloaded in a smooth motion and looked up just in time to the biggest, ugliest varren she had ever seen crest the concrete ridge about them. "Man in the colony said its rabid," Vakarian warned before releasing a short, controlled burst from his rifle. Liara and Jane also opened fired, but even with their combined force, the varren was within meters of Vakarian before it collapsed. 

Jane spun around at another noise, pistol raised. Tali was floundering under a carcass and the commander immediately moved to help. "Did it pierce your suit?" she asked as she heaved the animal off the quarian. 

As soon as her arm was free, Tali had her omnitool out. "Running the diagnostic now," she said. A moment later, she added, "It looks like everything is intact, but I'm going to take an antibiotic just in case." 

Vakarian made a gruff noise behind her. "I wouldn't mind one myself," he said. "I'm covered in… fluids." 

"I'm sure Chakwas will have a nice round of meds for all of us back at the ship," Jane said as she pulled Tali to her feet. "Take a sample of that monster, will ya, Doc? And you two, check the rovers for power cells." Her team moved while Jane kept a careful eye on both the direction the varren had come from and the door they came through. Vakarian came up empty-handed, but Tali pulled a few still functioning cells out of the mass of metal, and along with the blood and tissue samples Liara had collected, they were ready to move on. 

More geth entrenched in the tunnels, more water valves, and Jane was finding that having an immediately solvable problem in front of her (put bullet in flash-light head) had eased her anxiety over what was going on in the colony above. Then, they ran into a human. 

"You don't want to go down there!" the man called as soon as he realized they were there. 

Jane holstered her pistol. "What are you doing down here?" 

"Nothing I should be," drawled the man, "and anything I shouldn't." Then the man screamed in pain, hands clenching into fists and knees buckling. Liara started forward, but Jane waved her back, unwilling to risk one of her team in the face of so much strangeness. She decided she had made the right call when the man straightened and said, exhilarated, "That was a good one. Very intense." He gripped his head in his hands. 

"What's the matter with you?" Jane asked, eyebrow arching. 

"Just invoking the master's whip," the man explained, still breathing hard. "Helps remind me I'm still alive. You're here for the geth aren't you? You're not the only one interested in those… things." 

"Who else is looking for the geth?" 

"Not looking for," he corrected, "looking to get rid of. There a thorn in the side of the --" Another shriek of pain interrupted his words, but he tried to keep going. "Trying to get to the --" 

This time the screams turned into hard, heavy laughter. "This one is no longer fit," said Tali. "We should leave him." 

Jane agreed. "Is there anything I can do to help you?" she asked, exasperated. "Do you even want help?" 

The man barked a final laugh. "Help me? No. No one can help me now." His breathing was growing strained. "I'd rather die fighting." 

"Fighting what?" Jane demanded. She was getting really irritated by no one saying what they meant around here. 

"Not that kind of fight," he countered, gritting it out like he was still in pain. "It's like running through a thorn bush. The more you struggle…" He suddenly stopped, perking up like he'd heard a dog whistle. "Time's up. Company's coming. Ask Fai Dan. Ask him about the --" 

As the man collapsed again into another screaming fit, Vakarian called, "Geth on our six!" 

They put the geth down easily enough, but when Jane turned back to the human, he was just muttering nonsense and didn't respond to any of her queries. She tossed a water pouch and a ration bar at his feet, then ordered her team back the way they came; it was time to cross the bridge. They met some resistance on the other side -- snipers and stalkers -- but Jane was starting to wonder if they were going in the wrong direction when they encountered no other defenses. Tali assured her there was some kind of signal located less than a klick ahead of them. Unfortunately, taking out the rest of the geth in the area had put the krogan mercs guarding the transmitter on high alert, and they fired as soon as Vakarian had peered around the corner. "Two of 'em," he said. 

Jane spat an expletive. She hated fighting krogan. "Liara, focus on keeping them at a distance." Then she spun out and overloaded the closest one, the flash jumping twice as bright as Tali did the same. Liara had caught the other one in a stasis field, but it was only a few seconds before both of them were on their feet and charging, and a few seconds was not enough time to stop a krogan with anything short of a rocket launcher, and even then you'd have to get lucky. The biotic threw one back, and Jane and Vakarian focused their fire on the other. Tali sabotaged his shotgun, but that wasn't as much of a concern as the hundreds of kilos of muscle and armor that were bearing down on the turian at her left. As the krogan brought up his shotgun to smash it down on Vakarian's helmet, Liara caught him with another throw, sending him back several meters and crashing him into a pillar, but by that point, the second krogan was headed their way, letting a few shots fly that impacted against Jane's shields with sharp hisses; they would only hold out so long. Jane sabotaged that gun, and they made a valiant attempt to put him down as Liara collected biotic energy again. 

It took a few more rounds of this. Jane's shields went out, but between her and Tali, the krogan weren't getting many shots off anyway. It was Liara's throw that put the first one down for good, but the second charged into Vakarian and got in a few punches to the turian's helmet before the rifle shoved in his gut did its job. "Shit," Jane breathed, looking at her fallen teammate. "Tali," she called, "blow that transmitter. Liara, watch our six." She holstered her pistol and crouched next to Vakarian, immediately hitting the _torin_ 's medigel button when she saw it. "Looks like we're trading places," she quipped, opening his visor. 

"Yeah, well, it worked so well for you earlier," Vakarian slurred. His eyes were having trouble focusing and there was bright blue blood welling up from a cut on his crest. Jane swiped it with her thumb, then smeared some more medigel from one of her pouches over it, watching the oozing start to coagulate. "How you feeling?" she asked, checking the _torin_ 's pupils again. 

"Just a little shook up," he said, sitting up much faster than Jane had. "I mean, tomorrow, I'll feel like I got hit by a cab, but I'm okay right now." 

Jane hummed an acknowledgement, noting that his pupils seemed to be reacting normally. "Looks like we could both use a little dodging practice." 

Vakarian snorted. "Speak for yourself. I took that hit on purpose." When she raised an eyebrow at him, a look that translated surprisingly well for turians, he said, "Of the four of us, I'm the one most likely to get back up after a hit like that." 

Jane found herself grinning. "Garrus the tank, they'll call you." 

"Huh?" 

She waved her hand idly as she stood and helped him do the same. "I'll explain later." 

An small explosion echoed from the alcove that had house the transmitter and Tali reappeared. Jane nodded her approval, then said, "Alright, let's get back to ground level. We'll take a little break, then hit the skyways next." 

On the return trip, she ordered Joker to drop the Mako on the skyways as close to their position as he could manage, then she radioed Alenko, updated him regarding the colony's infrastructure issues, and informed him about the strange man's even stranger behavior. "It's all quiet here, Commander," he said, "but we're keeping a close eye on things." 

Once at ground level, she directed her team to an alcove with good visibility in both directions. "Eat, drink, and rest," she said. "We'll head up the elevator in twenty-five." Vakarian settled himself against a wall where he could see down the corridor and Jane sat opposite, watching the other way. "Tali?" she said. "Your suit still holding?" 

"Yes, Commander," the quarian responded and returned to sipping purified water from a tube inside her mask. 

Giving her team a final once-over, Jane pulled out a water pouch of her own, sucking it dry before tearing the packaging of a ration bar with her teeth. She crunched through the freeze-dried protein-and-carb brick without tasting it, pushing her mind away from the colony and out the skyways above them. _Probably see some more of those walking tanks_ , she thought. _Hope Vakarian's got the Mako in good order._ Then she scoffed at her own lack of faith -- of course he had the Mako in good order. He put hours into that thing, with an attention to detail that she couldn't help but admire. 

Liara was downing a second ration bar; after tossing around krogan like she had, she was probably ravenous. Tali was manipulating her 'tool, though Jane had no idea what she was working on since it was all in quarian, and Vakarian had that watchful yet zoned-out look that you only developed after years of active duty, the look of soldier resting until some motion or sound (or probably scent, in the case of the _torin_ ) startled them into action. Ignoring the dull ache in her head, Jane let herself settle into his mirror image. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, another long chapter, and I've been posting at quite a clip (because I've been working on this dumb thing for way too long), but things might slow down for a bit because the university is my ol' ball-and-chain and we are coming up on finals.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the comments, subscriptions, and kudos! I hope to continue to entertain! 
> 
>  
> 
> GLOSSARY:
> 
> perir: male turian under the age of fifteen (MizDirected)
> 
> tarc: turian obscenity that translates as "shit" (MizDirected)
> 
> buratrum: turian equivalent to hell; the home of the spirits of those who die dishonorable or cowardly deaths (MizDirected)

Garrus was just getting comfortable when Shepard said, "Alright, folks, you gotta piss, now's the time to do it." The commander proceeded to get up and saunter over to a wall to, presumably, follow her own advice. Garrus averted his eyes and found another corner some ways away to relieve himself; it only took a couple of instances of wet armor for you to learn to empty your bladder any chance you got in the field. 

He was mildly surprised by how alright he felt, apart from the stinging cut on his crest. The armor Shepard had found for him was good, a little less flexible that his old set, but he wasn't looking to go out dancing in it any time soon. He might need to work on the right elbow joint -- it was pinching when he was aiming his assault rifle -- but that could wait. 

The elevator they took seemed sturdy enough, but as they neared the top, Garrus could already feel the vibration that came with heavy munitions. He pulled his Crossfire from his back, and Shepard unholstered her own weapon in response. When the doors opened, she darted forward to duck behind cover next to a couple other humans, but Garrus opted to stay just inside the elevator and fire over their heads. Once the rocket trooper was down, the rest was relatively easy, and after Shepard ordered the colonists back down to the outpost, they jogged out a large bay door toward the Mako. "Any chance you'll let me drive this time?" he asked Shepard as she ducked in the back hatch, followed by Liara and Tali. 

"I'm not saying you don't know how to handle the Mako," she called, seating herself at the controls. "I'm just saying that some of us know how to make it dance. Take the cannon. Liara, the main gun. Tali, you're on nav and repairs." 

Garrus grumbled good-naturedly as he warmed up the rover's big gun, surveying the incoming diagnostics as Shepard got them moving. Soon they came up on the first round of hostiles, and he had to admit, while the human drove like an insane person when there was nothing at stake, as soon as they were under fire, her moves were all fine-tuned precision: a quick slide out of the way of a rocket, boosting over an incoming photon shot, easing back and forth out of cover in time with Garrus's cannon reloads. As soon as the field was clear, though, she was back to tearing down the skyway at a breakneck pace. 

"We've got some weak comm signals coming in," Tali said after they'd traveled around two klicks. "I can't tell much, but it sounds like it might be a group of survivors." 

"Put it through the speakers, Tali," Shepard ordered as she pulled up short just inside weapons range of another walking tank. Garrus plugged it with a shot and Liara followed up with some suppressing fire as Shepard hit the boosters and skipped them over three different rockets. Still, their shields weren't looking great. "Tali," he called, "get that omnigel prepped. We can take about two more hits." 

He managed to get off one more shot, putting down a couple of troopers, before the commander moved to cover. While the quarian worked on getting them running again, the rest of the team listened to the broadcast. For a while, the only sound was Tali working. Then, a woman's voice said, "Any sign of movement? Lizbeth could still be there. It's only been a few days." 

"It does sound like survivors," Garrus agreed. 

Shepard's brow drew together. "Maybe from the ExoGeni headquarters." She looked over the controls, checking the Mako's status. "We'll give it another minute," she said. "Looks like it's just the tank left in this group." 

Sure enough, when they pulled back out, only the tank was waiting for them. Garrus and Liara whittled down on the shields, while Shepard kept them out of fire as much as possible. Once there was nothing but a pile of twisted metal left behind, the commander continued forward, guiding the rover into a covered area. "We've got movement," the voice on the radio said. "Some kind of vehicle. Not one of the geth." 

"They've got us on visual," said Liara, scanning their surroundings with the targeting holo. "We must be close." 

"Dealing with the geth is more important," Tali insisted, but Shepard pulled them to a halt anyway. "If they're ExoGeni, they may know something about why the geth are here," she explained, trooping toward the back hatch and opening it. 

Garrus followed her out, using his longer stride to get just a little ahead of her, Crossfire at the ready. Shepard had never complained or tried to put him in his place when he did this, and now that he knew she'd been on a turian ship for a while, he was pretty sure it was because she knew this was standard turian military practice. _Because sending the commanding officer in first is stupid_ , he thought. This time, Shepard seemed to slip behind him, letting his body shield her from view of whatever might be in the tunnel ahead. 

Inside, a few humans were behind cover watching the entrance -- _Probably security staff_ , Garrus thought -- but many others were milling around looking lost. Garrus had taken barely two steps into the bunker when a short, pale man pointed a finger straight at his chest. "That's close enough," he barked. 

"Relax, Jeong," said an exasperated woman. "There obviously not geth." 

"Get back, Juliana," snapped the man -- Jeong. He turned toward Garrus. "Who are you? What do you want?" 

Shepard stepped around from behind him and answered before Garrus could say anything. "Commander Shepard. I'm here to remove your geth problem." 

"You see?" said the woman. "You worry too much." 

"And you trust too easily, Juliana," Jeong retorted. Garrus decided he didn't care for the man. 

"I'm just glad to see a friendly face," the woman went on. "I thought we were the only humans left on this planet." 

"Fai Dan and some of the members of Zhu's Hope are still alive," Shepard informed her, shifting her weight from one leg nearest Jeong to the other, as though she was physically siding with Juliana. Garrus decided his assessment of the man had been correct. 

Juliana turned on Jeong. "I thought you said they were all dead!" 

"I said they were _probably_ all dead," Jeong corrected. 

"They are surviving despite everything the geth have done to them," Liara assured him. 

Juliana's face fell. "We know what that's like. Those damn synthetics are relentless." 

"I need some information," Shepard said, getting straight to business. 

Jeong narrowed his eyes at her. "What kind of information?" 

"Ignore him," Juliana said, circling her eyes around as though following something that was flying overhead. "The geth are up in the ExoGeni headquarters. Just a bit further along the skyway." 

"Those headquarters are private property, soldier!" Jeong interjected. "Remove the geth and nothing else." 

Garrus glanced down at Shepard. The vertical line on her forehead was very deep and her jaw was clenched. "I didn't come for your company's secrets," she said, coldly. Garrus let his mandibles flap a little in amusement, doubting any of the ExoGeni staff could read turian faces. _But we are damn sure here for them now_ , he thought. 

Shepard started to leave, but the woman Juliana called, "Commander, before you go!" Shepard turned back and she went on. "My daughter, Lizbeth. She's missing... 

"They shouldn't waste time poking around," Jeong cut her off. "We can do an accounting of our casualties once the geth after the geth are gone." 

"That's my daughter you're talking about," Juliana shot back. "She's still alive. I know it." 

"Where is she?" Shepard asked, keeping her attention focused on Juliana. 

"She was in the ExoGeni building when the attacks started," the woman explained. 

"Oh yeah," Jeong responded, "there's several places she could hide. For a short time." Even Garrus could hear the sarcasm. He had moved from disliking the man to wanting to break his jaw. 

"If she's in there, we'll get her out." Shepard said, still ignoring Jeong the same way one might ignore a particular unruly _perir_ at a dinner party. "Stay put until we get back." 

As the team made their way back to the Mako, Tali said, sounding just a little put out, "You didn't even ask them if they knew why the geth were here." 

"We wouldn't get any straight answers from them," Shepard replied, ducking into the hatch. "Not with that hat for one's buttocks in the room." There was a pause as all three non-humans tried to parse the idiom, glancing at each other as they took their places in the rover. "That didn't translate well, did it?" Shepard said, without turning around. "I'm going to guess you at least got the sense of something useless and silly?" 

"I'll say," Tali wheezed, starting to laugh. "This is a thing you humans call people? A hat for one's buttocks?" 

"Well, it sounds better in human common," Shepard explained as she put the rover in gear and got them moving. "I would have thought the translators mods would have that one." She was driving fast toward a little flutter of movement. "I mean, they have 'ass' and they have 'hat,' but put them together and y'all are hearing 'a hat for one's buttocks'." 

"Not that I don't enjoy your lectures on human vernacular," Garrus said, watching another walking tank grow in the cannon sights, "but maybe we can discuss this back on the ship. Over drinks, perhaps." He fired right before Shepard cut hard to the right, causing Liara to strafe all across the skyway. Recentering herself, Liara took out a rocket trooper before Shepard jerked the Mako again, then a little hop resulted in Garrus's shot going wide. " _Tarc_ ," he spat under his breath. 

"See?" said Shepard, taking another sharp turn. "That translates just fine. You say ' _tarc_ '" -- _Why the hell is she attempting to speak turian common at a time like this?_ Garrus wondered, lining up his next shot -- "and I hear 'shit.'" Another little hop, then she barked, "Fire!" He did, hitting the tank dead in its head, and Shepard picked her diatribe back up. "Sure, sometimes turians use ' _tarc_ ' in contexts where humans wouldn't use 'shit' and it sounds weird." Another little hop, then Garrus fired again, and the tank went down in surge of electricity. Liara kept firing at the troopers surrounding it, putting them down one by one. "But, the translator at least has the decency to find the closest equivalent in both connotation and denotation," Shepard continued. 

Garrus spun on her. "Why in _buratrum_ are you talking about this right now?!" he growled. 

The field cleared, she gunned the Mako forward, the inertia throwing Garrus back a little. "Because I am very, very pissed right now," Shepard answered him, in the same level tone she'd been using, "and this is my way of not turning around to blow that [untranslatable]'s head off right this second." 

Garrus's jaw clamped shut and his mandibles pulled up tight. He decided it was better to not ask her exactly what term she had used that his translator couldn't handle. 

They were forced to stop just outside the ExoGeni building, where a narrow gap was their only entrance. "Good ambush spot," Shepard said, eyeing it through the Mako's front viewport. "Everybody out, but stay back." Garrus stood stiffly and clambered out after Tali and Liara, immediately pulling out his sniper rifle to get a better look through the scope. He heard Shepard do the same as she said, "Tali, Liara, watch our six." 

He could make out a few shapes darting around, but the interior was in deep shadow and his visor always had trouble with geth signatures. "I'm guessing stalkers," he said, hearing how tense his own subvocals sounded and wincing a little internally. 

Shepard hummed in agreement. "We'll try to take a few out before we head in," she said, dropping down to one knee to steady her aim. Garrus remained standing, using his height to get a different angle. He watched the movement for several seconds, noticing how frequently one of the stalkers would land on a bit of rubble just within their line of sight, probably to get eyes on them too, before darting away. He aimed, waited, and fired as soon as movement caught his eye again. One dead stalker lay on the ground. Another shot boomed out from below him, and a second stalker fell from the ceiling. 

Garrus went back to watching, looking for the little darts across the opening. A lot less movement now, maybe just one more, and it seemed to have learned a lesson from its comrades and refused to pause where they could get a bead on it. After a minute of this, Shepard said, "Alright, we'll go wide. You take the right, I'll go left." 

Garrus nodded, stepping slowly to the right and looking for anything new that appeared in his scope as he moved. He stopped as soon as he saw a shift in shadow, then a shot cracked over to the left and Shepard said, "Got the stalker." 

"Got something else here," he replied, watching the shadow move and noticing another. "I'm thinking a couple of troopers, but they're down behind a wall where I can't get them." 

He heard Shepard collapse her Mantis and looked over. "Stay here, keep a bead on them, and I'll go in," she said, putting the sniper rifle on her back and pulling out her pistol. She gave him a tight smile. "You're not mad enough to shoot me in the back, are you?" 

Garrus's mandible dropped and pulled up again in surprise. "Sorry, Commander," he said, returning his eye to his scope. 

"No apology needed," she said. "I am a grade-A fucking weirdo." As she got closer to the gap, she blocked his shot, but just for a bit. Then she was slipping through the opening and backing out of his sight before he heard the sound of pistol shots. A geth popped up out of cover, and Garrus took its head of cleanly. He slide the bolt as quickly as he could and got the rifle back to his shoulder, but by then, Shepard had the second geth in pieces. "All clear," she said. "Everybody in." 

As he pulled drag behind Liara and Tali, Garrus found that he wasn't feeling angry any more. Instead, he was wondering exactly what it was about Jeong that had set Shepard off like that. He pushed the thought away. _Later_ , he told himself, _and over a drink_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I assume that GoGirls (or GoGirl-like devices) come standard in all human female armor. It was actually a huge step forward in gender equality in Alliance service.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GLOSSARY
> 
> torin: male turian over the age of majority (MizDirected)

Jane was wishing that she had known this was a one-way trip down into a fucking sewer when Liara had cautioned her about it being a one-way trip. She might have made some different choices. As it was, Jane had very strong feelings about the number of sewers that one should have to experience in the course of one's career, and she was _well_ over the limit. 

She was also feeling like she'd had enough varren charging at her to last a lifetime. Surely there was some kind of universal quota that she had met. Maybe she just needed to file the right paperwork with whatever higher powers might be. 

They had found the missing daughter, Lizbeth, who had told them about ExoGeni's dirty little secret: the Thorian, a very old, indigenous plant being that asshat Jeong hadn't seen fit to mention. Lizbeth had also given them her ID, which would make moving through the facility easier, though not by much given that the geth had energy fields blocking all the exits. 

Checking around for any more varren, Jane said, "Everyone alright?" 

"I don't suppose the Alliance has developed a varren repellant yet," Tali said, breathing heavily behind her mask. 

"Left it in my other utility belt," Jane quipped, starting toward a light at the end of the tunnel and the door beyond it. 

"You mean you do have varren repellant and you just left it on the ship!" Liara blurted. 

"Sorry," Jane said, letting Vakarian get a couple of steps ahead of her as they closed on the portal. "Human joke. Really out-of-date human joke. We don't have varren repellant." She planted herself to the side of the door and nodded for the _torin_ to open it. He did and ducked through, calling, "Clear!" She followed and they started up the stairs before them, through Vakarian soon slowed. "I hear someone," he muttered low, even though his helmet made unlikely the target could hear him. 

Jane waved him back and signaled for her team to wait as she slipped silently up the stairs until she could hear what Vakarian was talking about. Two voices, one was definitely krogan and the other sounded like it belonged to a VI. She stuck her head around the corner very slowly, eyes confirming that her ears had told her. "A krogan," she breathed into her comms. "I'm going to bring him your way." 

"Roger, Shepard," Vakarian responded. As he gave directions to Liara and Tali, Jane wasted a brief moment wondering what he was saying that translated as "Roger." Then she spun around the corner, fired a couple of pot shots at the krogan, and ran for her life. Luckily, Vakarian had the ambush all set and the very angry, bellowing krogan behind her ran straight into a firefight he wasn't expecting. It was going great until Liara took a shotgun blast to the shields that knocked her down, interrupting the steady stream of biotic throws that were keeping the merc at bay, but by that point the krogan was on his last leg anyway. Jane helped Liara backed to her feet and checked her over while Garrus scouted on up the stairs to see if they had attracted any other hostiles. 

The VI immediately recognized Lizbeth's ID card as Jane approached, and, opening the visor on her helmet, she asked it what the krogan had been trying to access in the first place. 

"Fetching data," the VI said. "The previous user was attempting to access details on the study of Subject Species 37, the Thorian." 

"Tell me everything you told the krogan," Jane demanded. 

"I was unable to provide the previous user with any relevant data," the VI responded, nonplussed by Jane's tone. "Aside from lack of proper access, there has been no new data available on Species 37. All sensors monitoring the observation post at Zhu's Hope have been inactive for several cycles." 

Liara stepped up closer to the terminal and Jane shared a wary glance with her. "What does Zhu's Hope have to do with the Thorian?" the commander asked. 

"Species 37 is located within the substructure of the Zhu's Hope outpost," the VI said. 

"I think we may have found what Saren is after," Liara said, opening her omnitool to take some notes. 

"Seems that way," Jane agreed, then turned back to the VI. "Tell me everything you can about the Thorian." 

"The Thorian is a simple plant life form that exhibits sentient behavior uncommon with other flora," the VI recited. "Through dispersion and the eventual inhalation of spores, it can infect and control other organisms, including humans." 

"Motherfucker," Jane breathed, gut lurching. 

The VI went on, oblivious to Jane's despair. "The Zhu's Hope control group has yielded interesting results. Before sensors went offline, almost 85% of the test subjects were infected." 

"Wait," Jane interjected, "so you're telling me that ExoGeni knew its people were getting infected?" 

"It was deemed necessary to assess the true potential of Species 37," the VI confirmed. 

Jane pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'm going to kill him," she muttered, picturing Jeong's brains splattering all over a wall. Thinking human beings were just test subjects for him to play with? Trying to cover his own ass with claims of "private property" and "assessing true potential"? "I'm going to kill that motherfucker." Then she thumbed her comms over to Alenko's channel. "Alenko? Come in, LT." There was nothing but static. "Damn it," she snapped. "That field's blocking us." 

"All the more reason for us to get a move on, Shepard," Vakarian said from where he was watching down the stairs. It sounded like he was still a little annoyed with her. And honestly, he had every right; she was letting her emotions get the best of her. So, she sucked in one deep breath, held it for a handful of seconds, then blew it out again, letting the anxiety and anger go with it. "Alright," she said, "let's move." 

The geth were powering the barriers with cables from their ship, but after clearing one room of all synthetics, the problem just looked more complicated. "I see no way to disconnect these power cables with the tools we have available," Tali told Jane after a thorough investigation. 

"These legs that they've jammed through the walls may be a structural weak point," Vakarian added. 

"Yes," Tali agreed, "if we could somehow break one leg, I believe the rest of the ship would become unstable and fall." 

In all honesty, Jane was only listening with half an ear. Her attention was instead focused on the object that the geth had been, well, _kneeling_ at when they had entered the room: a shining orb surrounded by pillars of dark metal. "Why would the geth have something like this?" she asked suddenly, gesturing at it. "Something like an altar?" 

Her team turned to see what she meant. "If they believe the Reapers to be gods," Liara posited, "then an altar to them wouldn't be amiss." 

Jane scowled. "I dunno, it just seems odd that synthetics would waste time, space, and resources to construct an altar. And is anyone else hearing that noise?" It was almost like a skittering sound, but it was always behind her head, no matter which way she turned. Liara and Tali looked at her blankly, but Vakarian gave a somewhat hesitant affirmative, which calmed Jane's nerves a fraction -- at least it wasn't her own personal auditory hallucination. "Alright, Liara take some scans of that thing. Holos and audio too." She turned to look up at the supporting leg of the ship. "So what do you think it would take to break one of those?" 

Tali's body language conveyed a great deal of skepticism. "If we had managed to get the Mako in here we might have had a chance." 

Jane shifted her shoulders inside her armor; she wanted to be away from that orb. "So we keep moving and see what this facility has to offer," she said, pulling up a projection of the building's blueprints on her omnitool. "It looks like there'll be more legs on the floor above us, so if we can get up there, we might have a better opportunity." 

"Finished, Shepard," Liara chimed, closing her 'tool and joining them around the projection. 

"Then let's move out." 

The next floor did in fact provide more opportunities, but only after it provided several chances for them to die. As they crested a short staircase in the middle of the cavernous room they had entered, crouching low to stay out of sight, Tali let out a soft curse. "That's a geth prime," she said, "an intelligence hub." 

"Also heavily armed," Vakarian noted. 

Jane swept her eyes across the room. Besides the prime, which was about 100 meters away, there were a number of troopers working at consoles. "Vakarian, sniper rifle," she said, switching out her gun as well. "Tali, you're going to overload the prime and keep overloading as fast as you can. Liara, do whatever you can to keep the rest of the troopers off us; if they start to get close, Tali, help her. If that prime gets within 20 meters, we're going to retreat back down the stairs and take cover, force it to come after us. Everybody ready?" Affirmatives all around. Shepard lined up her first shot. "Okay, Tali, get this party started." 

Tali's overload caused absolute chaos for a few seconds, and Liara tossing the nearest troopers into one of his fellows only added to it. As soon as the flash died down, Jane pulled the trigger on her rifle, almost at the same time Vakarian did the same -- two clean shots in the head. As she pulled the bolt, the _torin_ said, "Shields are down." Faster than she'd expected. Maybe this would be easy. 

But when she popped out of cover to line up her next shot, she immediately dropped. "Rocket!" she warned, just seconds before it hit the wall at her back, knocking her on her face. From this new and interesting angle, she could see a trooper starting up the stairs to their little balcony before it was surrounded by a biotic aura and lifted into the air, only to fall with a crunch. Jane heard Vakarian get another shot off and she scrambled back up, aiming at the prime that was moving slowly but steadily toward them. She fired, then cursed as the thing stayed up, hitting her shields with a burst from its rifle. "Sabotage that gun," she order Tali. 

"Heavy armor," Vakarian barked, sharing the info from his visor as Tali blew out the rifle, buying them some time. "We're making a dent, but it's slow." He lined up another shot, fired, and ducked back down. "Rocket!" 

They all braced for the blast. "Liara, how you holding?" Jane asked after the impact. 

"Holding," was all she said in reply, so Jane aimed and took another shot. The prime was within 50 meters and still moving. Spying a group of troopers forming up just below them, she unclipped a grenade from her armor, pulled the pin with her teeth, and dropped it. "Fire in the hole," she warned, hunkering down again. 

Later, Jane would reflect on how bad a choice that had been. The little balcony's supports had already taken a beating from the prime's rocket blasts, and her grenade was the cinder block that broke the camel's back. A loud crack was the only warning before platform gave out underneath them. Jane found herself rolling head-over-heels, helmet bouncing against stone and rifle flying out of her hands, until she came to a stop on her side and -- thank all possible deities -- with a mound of rubble between her team and the prime. 

"On your feet, soldiers!" she snapped, scrambling up. Vakarian was up fast, already aiming his assault rifle from a crouch, and Tali was scooting herself into some semblance of cover. Jane grabbed what she could of Liara's armor and hauled her over to Tali just as the prime crested the debris, pulling out her Stiletto in the process. She fired as fast and as accurately as she could, knowing that another rocket from the prime would be the end of them and that they would still have a little time before its rifle was operational again. Stepping away from Vakarian so the prime had to split its attention, Jane emptied the clip and continued moving as she pulled out another and jammed it into her pistol. The prime was close enough that she could see a new round loading the launcher, and she felt more than heard a screech of frustration tear from her throat as the geth turned toward Vakarian and the rest of her team. 

Then, miracle of miracles, the bastard went down with a high squeal of electronic surprise. Jane glanced at Vakarian, but he was still focused on the ridge she had inadvertently created. She waited as well, but after a few seconds of no movement, she said, "Let's take a look." 

He nodded and stood, knees still bent low as he crept up the small rise with careful quiet footsteps and his rifle at the ready. 

On the other side, a couple of half-smashed geth shuddered on the floor, but the _torin_ quickly ended them while Jane watched his back. After ensuring the other half of the room was clear, they returned to Tali and Liara. The quarian was helping the asari sit up, and Liara was clearly struggling. Jane took her weight off the engineer and said, "Tali, check your suit." Pulling off Liara's helmet, she studied the asari's pupils, then jerked off a glove to press a hand against her face. "How you doing, Liara?" she asked gently. 

"I..." the scientist started, then paused to swallow. "I believe I may have overextended myself a bit." 

"That's alright," Jane soothed, letting her lean back against the rock behind her. "Just rest here." The commander pawed around her armor and came up with a water pouch and another squeezable tube. She held the latter up in front of Liara's eyes. "This is peanut butter," she explained. "Lots of calories, easy to eat." Then she tore the top off with her teeth and put it in the asari's hands. 

Jane then turned her attention to the rest of her squad. "You two okay?" 

"I am fine, Shepard," Tali answered, but she was starting to lose the excited edge to her voice, belying her fatigue. 

"Nothing serious," Vakarian reported. 

"Okay, Tali, take a look around, see if we can do anything about the leg in the room," Jane ordered. "Vakarian, you're on watch." 

They moved to do their jobs, the turian taking position at the top of the rubble heap and the quarian scrambling over to investigate the room's opportunities. Jane returned her attention to Liara to see that the bionic had eaten about a third of the peanut butter and was sipping some water. Jane chuckled. "Yeah, it'll stick in your mouth, but it's fast energy. Think you can get up?" 

Liara nodded and let Jane pull her to her feet. They navigated their way to the other side of the room slowly, and once there, with Tali in sight, Jane lowered the scientist back down. "Alright, eat the rest of that, and if you need any more ration bars or water, holler." 

"Yes, Commander." The asari still sounded like she was on the edge of consciousness, but her color was better and her skin less clammy. 

Jane took a good look around, then headed toward the one terminal in the room that wasn't in pieces. After her initial attempts to interface with it, she realized the encryption was geth, not human like she'd expected. "Alright, Jane," she muttered to herself, "let's see how good you still are at this." 

Hacking had always been the part of infiltration work she'd struggled with the most, despite Anderson finding her the best tutors the Alliance could buy and/or coerce. The best of those had been Birina, a salarian information broker that had talked about computers like they were people. "Think of yourself as trying to coax an old friend into tell you why they are sad or upset," she had advised Shepard. "The relationship is not an antagonistic one; instead, it is just a matter of convincing the computer that it can trust you with its secrets." 

The first couple of security firewalls went down easy. "Just the small talk," Jane told herself, fingers working on her 'tool. "Now we get into gently dodging around the subject." 

"Shepard!" Tali called. 

"Anybody shooting?" she asked, not shifting her focus. 

"No, but..." 

"Then hold it for a minute." She got past a few more layers of encryption, thought she'd made a huge error that turned out to be a convenient gut instinct gone right, and started transferring whatever files were now available to her. There was another security level, but Jane didn't want to risk getting whatever that was downloading to her 'tool, so she waited until it was finished, then plunged ahead... just to be met with a blank screen. She huffed a sigh. "Well, I guess we can't be friends anymore," she said. She turned to Tali. "What did you find?" 

Tali gestured excitedly toward a maintenance console on the far wall. "That controls one of the bay doors, but it's been broken for some time, so the workers have been leaving it open. The geth ship just stuck one of its supports right in it." 

"So we need to close the door?" Jane started toward it, Tali in tow. 

"Not exactly," the quarian explained. "What happens is that if the atmospheric pressure is between a certain range, the door snaps shut with enough force to be a serious danger, which is why it was just left open. We need to make it snap shut." 

"Can you do it?" Jane said, looking over the different valves and levers. 

Tali sounded mildly insulted. "Of course, Shepard. I just wanted to make sure that's what you want." 

Shepard nodded. "Do it. I'll see about getting Liara up on her feet." She headed back to the asari. "You catch all that, Vakarian?" she asked. 

"Affirmative," he said. "We'll need to get moving as soon as it's done, though. No reason to stay hemmed in here when the geth will know where we are." 

"Agreed," she said, reaching Liara. The tube of peanut butter was empty, as was another ration bar package and the water pouch. "How you feeling?" she asked the scientist. 

"Much better," Liara answered, getting to her feet, "though I don't know how much biotic power I'll be able to manage before an extended rest." 

Shepard nodded. "Then stick to guns unless we get in really, really deep shit." 

"Alright, Commander," Tali said, "I'm ready. I suggest we all take cover away from the leg." 

Vakarian climbed down from his perch to shelter with her and Liara near Tali and the console. Tali pressed some buttons, they heard the harsh clang of metal against metal followed terrible screeching, then the leg crumpled and the entire building was shaking as the other supports collapsed under the newly added weight and the geth ship succumbed to gravity. Jane and team huddled in their relative safely for a the long minute it took for things to settle, then suddenly Joker was in her ear. "--mander! Damn it, Shepard, come in!" 

"I'm here, Joker," she said, quickly. 

"The colonists have gone crazy!" the pilot squawked. "They're crawling all over the outside of the ship!" 

"Bravo team?" she asked. 

"They came back aboard as soon as things got weird." 

"Is anyone actually doing any damage?" 

"Negative, Commander," Joker reported. "Not much chance they'll get in either." 

"Alright, just hang tight. We're heading back your way." She looked around her team, flipping comms over to the local channel. "Things have gone up shit creek back Zhu's Hope. Let's move." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one more Feros chapter, I promise. 
> 
> I haven't written Virmire yet, but I can only imagine what's going to happen when I start...


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GLOSSARY:
> 
> Torin: male turian above the age of majority (MizDirected)

They picked up Lizbeth on their way back through the facility and crammed into the Mako. The skyway was clear back to where the ExoGeni survivors had camped out. Hearing her mother's voice on the radio, Lizbeth wasted no time jumping out of the rover and dragging Jane and her team back into an ExoGeni HR nightmare. The scientist at least had enough sense to crouch behind a crate instead of rushing straight in, and Jane took cover behind another. 

"You can't do this, Jeong," Juliana said. 

Jeong was pacing with one hand clasped to his head and the other gripping a pistol. "Everyone shut up!" he snapped. "Let me think!" 

"What's going on?" Lizbeth whispered, just a little too loudly. Vakarian quickly shushed her with a gloved hand over her mouth. 

"You won't get away with this," Juliana retorted, but she was grabbed from behind by one of the security guards as she stalked toward Jeong. 

"Get her out of here," Jeong ordered, voice tight and lines on his face deeper with tension. 

That was too much for Lizbeth, who shrugged off the _torin_ and stood, shouting as she rushed forward. "Get away from her, you son of a bitch!" 

Jane groaned internally. All chance of surprise lost now. "Damn it!" Jeong said. "Come out where I can see you! All of you!" So Jane and Vakarian did as they were told, Liara and Tali trailing them. "Hah, Shepard," Jeong sneered. "I knew it was too much to hope the geth would kill you. I found out some interesting facts about you in the ExoGeni database. I know what happened at Akuze. This doesn't have to end like that." 

"You're right," Jane replied with a sneer of her own. "I seriously doubt you've got a thresher maw in your pants." She knew she should play nice, try to deescalate the situation, but, shit, she really hated this man. "So, what are you yelling about now?" 

Jeong seemed somewhat cowed by her presence, or maybe it was the hulking turian behind her. "You don't understand. Communications are back up. ExoGeni wants this place purged." 

"Oh, I see." Jane crossed her arms over her chest. "You need to cover up your dirty little secret." 

"What do you mean?" Juliana asked, looking between Jeong and the commander. It was Lizbeth who explained. "The Thorian. It's a telepathic life-form living under Zhu's Hope." She rubbed the back of her neck guiltily. "It's taking control of the colonists there. ExoGeni knew all along." 

Juliana's eyes flashed. "You won't get away with this, Jeong," she repeated with renewed intensity. 

"So you keep saying," he spat back, "but nobody's going to miss a few colonists." 

Jane couldn't take any more. "I won't let you hurt these people any more," she growled. "Drop your weapon, or be prepared to use it." 

"If that's the way it has to be," Jeong stuttered, "then come on!" He lifted his weapon, aiming at Lizbeth. The man never stood a chance as Jane put a bullet cleanly through his left eye. A couple of guards shifted towards the action, but Vakarian glared at them and Liara let her biotics flare a little, despite her fatigue. It was enough to settle down any thoughts of retribution. 

Juliana made some snide comment about "shooting each other in the back," but before Jane could respond, Tali chimed in. "Would you prefer to have lost the lives of all the colonists instead of one man?" the quarian asked in disbelief. 

"It's my fault!" Lizbeth wailed. "I knew what was happening and I didn't do anything!" 

"Don't you start," her mother chided. "You do good work and you know it." 

Jane rolled her eyes. She needed to get away from corporate researchers and their deeply skewed sense of ethics and personal responsibility (or lack thereof) before she ended up shooting each and every one of them. "We still have a colony to save," she reminded the pair. 

"The colonists won't let you near the Thorian," Lizbeth said. "They'd die first." 

"Oh great, so we're back to mowing down colonists!" Jane snapped. "Aren't you people supposed to be scientists! Figure something out!" 

Lizbeth jumped back at Jane's outburst, but Juliana just looked thoughtful. "What if you used a nerve agent to neutralize the colonists?" she said after a moment. "If their nervous systems are already weakened, low doses of something like Tetraclopine may act as a paralyzing agent. We could fix it into a gas grenade." 

"Good thing we all brought helmets," Vakarian muttered behind her. 

"Do you have the materials on hand?" Jane asked Juliana. 

"I believe so," the woman answered. "Give us about a half an hour to get it together." 

While the scientists worked, Jane's team took a little rest, though Vakarian kept a chary eye on the security forces lounging in a corner. Jane got another tube of peanut butter into Liara, who seemed to like the stuff despite the stickiness, and had a ration bar herself. Sitting on the floor with her back to the crate Tali was perched on, Jane took stock of her body. Her head wasn't feeling too bad anymore, but her body was starting to feel sore from all the banging around. _Come on, Jane_ , she told herself, _just a little bit more. How hard can knocking out a few colonists and killing a sapient plant be_? 

An hour later, after neutralizing a dozen colonists, fighting a few dozen creepers, and watching Fai Dan blow his own brains out, Jane found herself standing in front of the Thorian and regretted her earlier cavalierness. "This could be… problematic," she said. She took a few steps towards the writhing mass, taking care to avoid the dripping liquid sliding off it, wondering what the smell must be like if she was having trouble with it through the air filters in her helmet. It almost looked like it had a face, a flat round area covered in harder looking stuff than the rest of it, almost like turian plates, but if that was the case, the asari commando that was suddenly in front of her came out its mouth. 

"Invaders!" the asari said, oddly monotone. "Your every step is a transgression. A thousand feelers appraise you as meat, good only to dig or decompose." 

Jane shared a look with Liara, who had moved up beside her, omnitool poised to record the exchange. This asari's voice didn't sound like the one who had been possessed by the rachni queen, but she was undoubtedly also a puppet. 

"I speak for the Old Growth," the asari went on, "as I spoke for Saren. You are within and before the Thorian. It commands that you be in awe." 

_Alright_ , thought Jane. _Might as well start with diplomacy. Can't hurt to try to reason with the giant sentient plant with an ego to rival Udina's._ "You gave something to Saren," Jane said, "something I need." 

"Saren sought knowledge of those who are gone," the asari answered. "The Old Growth listened to flesh for the first time in the Long Cycle. Trades were made." The puppet's face grew hard. "Then cold ones began killing the flesh that would tend the next cycle. Flesh fairly given! The Old Growth sees the air you push as lies! It will listen no more!" 

Jane gritted her teeth. "I won't let you keep your slaves," she said, taking another step forward. "Release them, now!" 

The asari was unmoved. "No more will the Thorian listen to those that scurry. Your lives are short, but have gone on too long." She pulled a sidearm from a holster. "Your blood will feed the ground and the new growth!" 

She barely got the words out before Vakarian and Tali were overloading her shields. Jane ducked to the side to find some cover and saw more creepers coming out of the woodwork to flank the team. She let out a frustrated growl as she pulled out her pistol, trying to put as many of them down before they could get close enough to spew noxious goop everywhere. A biotic throw pushed one back into several others, slamming them all into the wall, and a quick burst from Vakarian's Crossfire put them down. 

Jane used the brief reprieve to get a good look around. Out of curiosity, she popped off a few shots at the Thorian's "face," but the rounds did no damage she could see. _Gotta be a weakness somewhere_ , she thought, wishing for a flamethrower, or even a canister of gas and a match. Her eyes traveled up the Thorian's form, spying thick tendrils anchoring it into the walls of the chamber, a little grin growing her face. She started toward the ruins of a staircase, team trailing behind her. 

"What's the plan here, Shepard?" Vakarian asked, sounding just a little nervous and opening fire on a new horde of creepers. 

Jane caught a glimpse of another asari -- _A clone?_ \-- and prepped an overload on her 'tool. "There's a tried and true method for taking down opponents that are larger than you," she said, firing a one-handed shot at a rushing creeper and waiting for the asari to move out from behind cover. "One that we've already exploited once today." 

"We're going to take out its legs?" the _torin_ asked, smoothly reloading his heat sink. 

The clone finally made her move, and Jane fried her, following up with a couple of shots before she was forced to dodge the warp thrown her way. Scrambling back to her feet, she snarled through her teeth, "We are taking out this motherfucking cunt-puncher's legs." 

At the top of the stairs, they found one of the anchors, which looked softer and fleshier than the rest of the Thorian -- _Root system? Connection to above ground?_ Jane wondered in the part of her brain that wasn't focused on not dying. She took a couple of shots, saw them pierce the surface, then decided a grenade would be faster. The explosion was satisfying and the Thorian made a noise that sounded like distress, but the satisfaction was short-lived as they hit yet another wave of creepers and yet another asari clone. 

It was slow going, pushing further and further up the chamber. Jane used grenades on the anchors until she ran out, then had Tali use her shotgun, which worked just as well even if it took slightly longer. Finally -- _finally_ \-- when Jane was sure that Liara was about to collapse and and she was giving her spare heat sinks to Vakarian, they reached the top and Tali blew the last leg. 

After the fall of the geth ship, the Thorian plummeting deeper into the earth was almost anticlimactic, but having another asari clone burst out of a pod on the wall made up for the lack of drama. At least, Jane assumed it was a clone, leveling her pistol at its head, until the commando gasped, "I'm free." 

Liara was the first to respond. "Is everything alright?" she asked, rushing to the asari's crouched form. "Are you hurt?" 

"I'm fine," the asari said, wiping fluids from her face and standing. "My name is Shiala. I serve --" She stopped herself, looked at Liara as if recognizing her. "I served Matriarch Benezia." 

Liara studied the commando's face. "I remember you, I think," the scientist said. "You were there the last time I visited my mother." 

Shiala nodded in confirmation. "When Benezia allied herself with Saren, so did I. Benezia foresaw the influence Saren would have. She joined him to guide him down a gentler path. But Saren is compelling. Benezia lost her way. We came to believe in Saren's cause and his goals." 

"Benezia sought to turn the river and was swept away," Liara said softly, placing a hand on Shiala's elbow. 

"Indoctrination," Jane said, after raising her visor and holstering her sidearm. " _Sovereign_ has some kind of tech that can indoctrinate individuals." 

"It can dominate the minds of his followers," Shiala responded, starting to pace. "They become indoctrinated to Saren's will. The process is subtle. It can take days, weeks." She stopped and looked Jane in the eye. "But in the end, it is absolute." Her gaze dropped. "I was a willing slave when Saren brought me to this world. He needed my biotics to communicate with the Thorian, to learn its secrets. Saren offered me in trade. I was sacrificed to secure an alliance between Saren and the Thorian." 

"But why?" Jane asked, reaching through her open visor to rub an itchy spot on her brow. Her fingers came away with flakes of dried blood on them. "What did Saren need from the Thorian?" 

"The Cipher," Shiala explained. "The beacon on Eden Prime gave him visions, but the visions were unclear, confusing. They were meant for a Prothean mind. The Thorian lived here under the Protheans for millennia, watching and studying. When they died, it consumed them. They became part of it, and as a consequence, it had something of that Prothean mind." The commando began gesturing as she spoke, and Jane noticed Liara watching with widening eyes. "The Cipher," Shiala went on, "is the very essence of being a Prothean, endemic ancestral memory. A viewpoint spanning thousands of Prothean generations. I melded with the Thorian to attain this knowledge, then passed it on to Saren." 

"I need that knowledge," Jane said. "Can you pass it on to me?" 

Shiala nodded moved closer. "Try to relax. Slow deep breaths." 

_Oh shit, Jane. What have you gotten yourself into?_ The first melding with Liara had been bad enough, and that had been to have stuff taken _out_ of her head. What would have stuff shoved _in_ feel like? 

"Let go of your physical shell," Shiala intoned, the words clearly a mantra of sorts. "Reach out to grasp the threads that bind us, one to another. Every action sends ripples across the galaxy. Every idea much touch another mind to live. Each emotion must mark another's spirit." 

Jane clearly heard Vakarian snort from behind his visor. 

"We are all connected." The commando was in her face at this point. Jane pushed down the urge to step back. "Everything living being united in a single, glorious existence. Open yourself to the universe." Shiala's head tilted back, and when she opened her eyes again, they had gone black. "Embrace eternity!" 

Some time later, Jane became aware of her body again, beginning with the sharp pain just behind her eyes, then the too-fast rate of her breath. She lifted her hand to rub at a temple. "Are you okay, Shepard?" Vakarian asked. 

"Yeah," she said, blinking hard and lifting her head. "Yeah, I'm fine." 

"I am sorry if you have suffered," Shiala said, "but there was no other way. You needed the Cipher. In time, it will help you understand the vision from the beacon." 

Jane made a noncommittal sound, starting to feel mildly queasy. "So, now that you're free," she said to Shiala, "what's your plan?" 

"If you will allow it, I would like to stay here with the colonists." The commando sighed heavily. "They have suffered greatly, and I played a role in their suffering. I would like to make amends." 

"Fine," Jane replied, her voice a little harsh, but she was just so tired. "They'll need all the help they can get. Now let's get out of this damn death-pit." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME on TETHER THREAD:  
> Medically-necessary nudity and angst!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, holiday travels and a small family emergency really guzzled up my time, but I'm back, baby!
> 
> GLOSSARY:
> 
> torin: a male turian over the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> firal: a shellfish-analogue originally found on the turian colony of Invictus. Some turians say that it's the only good thing to come from Invictus. Those would be unkind turians. (Author)

Garrus was pretty sure he had some kind of creeper remains inside his armor. He couldn’t remember ever being this desperate for a shower in his life --  _ Don’t think that, Vakarian, you know you’ve seen worse _ \-- but Shepard was still consulting with the surviving colonists and Garrus was still at her six. They’d come up from the Thorian’s lair to find the ExoGeni staff helping the just-reviving Zhu’s Hope residents, collecting everyone in the center of the outpost for basic medical checks, and the  _ torin _ was relieved to see the salarian merchant receiving the same attention and care as the humans. After doing that thing where she looked around without saying anything for what felt like way too long, Shepard had ordered Tali and Liara back to the  _ Normandy _ and straight to Chakwas. Then, turning to Garrus, she’d said, “You got a little more in you, big guy?”

His mandibles had fluttered. “I could go all day, as long as it doesn’t involve another giant plant monster.”

She smiled that tight smile. “Duly noted.”

But Shepard was moving pretty slow herself as she circulated around, asking questions about the colonists’ health and needed supplies. It wasn’t long before she’d radioed Alenko, ordering him to bring any staff with field medic or basic engineering training to help out. When the LT arrived, with Williams and a dozen other crewmembers following, Shepard’s directions had been brief. “Do whatever you can to help them,” she said. “Use whatever supplies we have that we won’t absolutely need to get to the nearest resupply -- you can consult with Joker on that. Also, get whatever samples you can of the Thorian and the creepers. We’ll stay a day. You’re in charge.”

“Yes ma’am,” Alenko responded, and immediately moved to consult with Juliana, who had become the de facto spokesperson of those who remained.

Shepard had headed back in the direction of the ship, and Garrus had taken a few strides in front of her, but as he started down the second set of stairs, he was pulled up short by a retching sound behind him. He turned, mandibles drawn up tight, to see Shepard leaned against a wall, vomiting. After menstruation, turians found vomiting the most perplexing and disturbing of human bodily functions, but Garrus had spent enough time patrolling the nightlife areas with C-Sec to be somewhat inured to the grossness of it.  He pulled a pouch of water out of his pocket and opened it, waiting until Shepard seemed to be done before handing it over. “You alright?” he asked.

Shepard drank from the pouch, then spit the water back out. “Yeah,” she said hoarsely, moving a few steps and leaning against the wall again. “Just… too many people invading my head lately.” She sipped at the water again. “The mild concussion doesn't help.” She grimaced and looked up at him. “Let's not mention this to Chakwas, yeah? She’ll put me on bedrest again.” She heaved herself upright and continued down the stairs. 

“You sure that's wise, Commander?” Garrus asked, falling in step beside her.

“It's just a nervous stomach, Vakarian,” she said, and he remembered the psych evals, how she had anxiety attacks after missions. Probably normal then. 

“Alright, Commander,” he answered. He still stayed close enough to grab her if she looked like she was going to fall. 

Back on the  _ Normandy _ , Chakwas had locked the medbay off as a clean room while she examined Tali, but Shepard insisted that Garrus wasn't going anywhere until he'd been checked for both rabies and mind-control spores, so they waited in the mess hall while the doctor finished up with the quarian. After a few minutes -- Garrus may have dozed off a little -- the door slid open and Tali emerged back in her suit. “Get some rest,” Chakwas was saying, “and come back in ten hours for another round of antibiotics.” She turned to look over her final two patients. “Come on in, get undressed,” she said, with something bordering on exasperation in her tone. 

Inside, Garrus turned away from the humans as he began unlatching his armor. He had no qualms about stripping to his hide in front of them, but it seemed to make them more comfortable if he at least pretended modesty. Chakwas had long ago discovered that she had no gowns that would fit him and instead provided him with a sheet to wrap around his waist, which was really just silly -- there was nothing to see unless his plates spread and that happening with Chakwas prodding at him was incredibly unlikely. 

“Did Liara give you the samples from the varren?” Shepard asked as she worked off her own armor, just dropping it on the floor from the sound of it. 

“Yes,” said the doctor from the other side of the room. “That thing was as disease-ridden as they come, but neither Liara nor Tali showed signs of infection. I gave them both a round of antibiotics just in case.”

“And did you check them for Thorian spores?”

“I'm beginning to think you doubt my skills as a physician,” Chakwas replied drily. “Of course I checked. They're fine.” Garrus heard a loud snort. “As fine as they can be after that.”

“I want all the data on the Thorian you can get while we're here,” Shepard said.

“You and everyone else on this God-forsaken colony.”

Garrus pulled the top half of his undersuit over his head, wincing a little as his ribs complained. He glanced down; very faint discoloring on the hide below his keel was starting to develop. The bruising higher up was much more pronounced.  _ That’s what happens when you decide it’s in everyone’s best interest to take a charging krogan to the keel, Vakarian _ , he chided himself, unzipping his leggings at the spurs and waist and easing them off. He wrapped the provided sheet around his lower body and turned to sit on the hospital bed before him. Shepard was sitting on the bed next to his, having forgone a gown in favor of draping herself in a sheet as well, bird tattoo clearly visible on her left shoulder.  _ Still there _ , Garrus thought absently, attention growing less focused as relished the feeling of sitting down.  _ Wonder if she still likes it or if it’s just that hard to remove tattoos from human skin _ . But his attention was soon focused on his stomach, which was starting to feel empty.

“Really, Shepard,” the doctor said, “I provide gowns for a reason.”

“Yeah, just to make me take them off again,” said Shepard, sounding as tired as he felt. “Seriously, doc, everyone in this room as seen my boobs, so let’s not make a big deal out of it.” 

Garrus blinked, then remembered the holos that had accompanied her files and supposed that, yes, he had seen her naked, though it hadn’t really registered at the time. Chakwas looked mildly startled, glancing sharply at Garrus then back at Shepard. “Whatever you say, Commander,” she said, shaking her head and looking at Garrus like he would understand the toll such forbearance took on her. She ran her omnitool all over him, shining a light in his eyes and prodding gently at the bruises that were forming. Eventually, she called over the bed’s medical interface and had it draw some blood while she studied her ‘tool’s readouts. “Well, Mr. Vakarian,” she said, “you’ve managed to crack your keel. I’m not going to ask how…” She shot a dirty look at Shepard, who just stared back levelly. “A couple hours in the regen field should do, though.” She glanced over at the machine that was doing something with his blood. “It doesn’t look like you’re rabid, but I’m giving you antibiotics anyway. Now blow hard into this,” she said, popping a tube into his mouth. Garrus blew as hard as he could, but it was clear that this device had been designed for species with lips and there was only so much he could do on that front. Chakwas seemed satisfied, telling him to lie back, bringing around a little table for him to rest his feet on, since these beds had not been made with seven-foot turians in mind, and setting up the regen field over his keel.

“How long am I going to be stuck here?” he asked.

“Two or three hours,” she said, “so get comfy, or I’ll sedate you.”

“Can I get something to eat?” His stomach was making its lack of food very known, now that it wasn’t worried he would die any second.

“I’ll call the mess sergeant, but only if you promise not to move until I say so.”

Dr. Chakwas was a hard woman, though watching Shepard go through the same treatment took some of the sting out of it. The doctor flashed a light in Shepard’s eyes, then said, “You took a knock to the head, didn’t you.”

“Took a little tumble, yeah,” Shepard answered noncommittally. 

“Headache?”

“Yeah.”

“Any nausea?”

Shepard shook her head, then winced like the movement hurt. As soon as Chakwas’s attention was on her ‘tool, Shepard looked at Garrus and did that thing humans do where they close one eye to signal a secret. He tried to do it back, but just ended up blinking. Shepard grinned.

The doctor tugged at Shepard’s sheet, examining the bruises that were forming on her torso. Garrus eyed them with empathy. “Quite a tumble, Commander,” Chakwas snarked. 

“It may have been geth-induced.”

The doctor ran her omnitool over the length of Shepard’s body before tugging the sheet back up a bit forcefully, but Shepard was almost lackadaisical in covering herself, like she really didn’t care.

“Mild concussion, bruised ribs,” the doctor announced. “Let’s get your blood.” 

A few minutes later, Chakwas told Shepard that she was also not rabid, but gave her an antibiotic shot as well after making her also blow into the tube device. “No strenuous activity for at least three days, though,” she warned the commander, “and with that concussion, no alcohol or sedatives for at least 20 hours. If you get dizzy or nauseated, or if you’re headache gets worse, come see me immediately.” 

“Alright, doc,” Shepard said, standing and wrapping the sheet around herself more tightly and securing it. She started to pick up the stray pieces of armor she dropped. 

Chakwas looked Garrus over, then said, “Permission to go ashore, Commander?”

Arms full of ceramic plating, Shepard said, “Permission granted, and take whatever supplies you think they can use. I’ll get Vakarian something to eat.” Chakwas was almost out the door when Shepard called to her. “Be sure to take a look at the salarian. I don’t know if any of the ExoGeni people on up on the xenophysiology.”

The commander tried to pick up more armor pieces, but just started dropping things. She huffed a sigh. “I’ll be back with some food,” she said, eyes flicking up at him before she headed out the door, sheet making a train behind her. When she returned a few minutes later, she was back in the Alliance-issued non-combat gear she usually wore around the ship and was carrying a couple of ration packets with steam rising from them. Garrus’s subvocals trilled at the smell as she passed one to him. “I think I got you two kinds of meat,” Shepard said, also handing him the pointy eating utensil humans favored. “Never got the hang of reading turian common, and these packets don’t have labels in human.”

“Thanks, Commander,” Garrus said through a mouthful roasted  _ firal _ . 

“No problem,” she replied, setting the other packet in easy reach. “Need anything else before I go?” He shook his head, shoving another chunk of food in his mouth. “Alright,” she said. “Have fun.”

Garrus continued inhaling his meal, thinking a little about how quickly the fatigue set into his body once the adrenaline was gone. Even when long years of experience had taught him to expect it, he was still sometimes surprised how easy it was to scarf down some rations and doze off after spending a few hours in a hot zone, which was exactly what he did.

+x+x+x+x+

Jane knew that working was the best way to keep the sensation that any second her body was going to fly apart because it could no longer contain the anxiety flooding her system at bay, so she did. She scrubbed the creeper goop off each and every piece of her armor, then polished the whole set, checking for any cracks or other damage to the plates before storing it in its locker. She walked up to the cockpit to make future flight plans with Joker; after Feros, they would resupply on Trident, about a two and a half day trip, and take any of the colonists with them who wanted to leave. After that… well, Shepard had to figure that out. Virmire was the next place the Council had suggested, but she was reticent to head there before she had more intel, and intel took time.

Immediate plans made, Jane took herself back in the medbay to check Vakarian, who was sleeping in the regen field, and Liara, who was sleeping in her bunk, several ration bar wrappers on the floor. She briefly considered going back out to check on things in the colony, but the idea of dealing with other people made her want to beat her head into a wall even more than she did right now. So, instead, Jane headed to her quarters and transferred the geth data she’d managed to steal to her desk terminal for examination. But her mind wouldn’t focus -- she looked at the lines of code on the screen but her thoughts were back in the field, wondering why the hell she’d dropped that grenade and almost gotten them all killed. She started pacing from one end of the cabin to the other and back again, asking herself if there had been any way to not kill the Thorian, to instead get more information out of it. Was the Cipher really all that Saren wanted from the Thorian? Had he only wanted it dead to keep her from that knowledge? And if he had, why not just blast the whole thing from space? Were the geth even there to kill the Thorian, or did they just want to get rid of the humans that were its thralls? What if Tali’s suit had been ripped by that varren? Would her team even still follow her if she lost one? And why did Hackett keep calling with missions that  _ only _ she could do? Why did the Council keep withholding intel? What the fuck was she going to do?

Jane found herself crammed between the cabinet that held her clothes and the  _ Normandy _ ’s cold, humming wall, head between her knees, hands clasped behind her neck and fingers prodding into the skin like somewhere there was an off-switch for what was happening, gasping in air just to hold her breath as long as she could before gasping again. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does anyone else spend way too much time trying to figure out how turians get pants on over their leg spurs? I think about this a lot.
> 
> Up Next: A nice big dose of fluff.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GLOSSARY
> 
> drellak: tall, relatively slender four-legged herd animals weighing approximately 300 kilos (MizDirected)
> 
> claustrum: basically a hermit or one who lives in seclusion. However, in traditional turian culture with its intense focus on community service, the desire to remove oneself from society was considered a severe moral failing. With time, the term lost its connotation of moral corruptness to become a more general obscenity, much like how "bastard" in contemporary usage rarely denotes a person whose parents were unmarried. (author)
> 
> torin/tarin: male/female turian over the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> perir: male turian under the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> mari: informal term for mother (MizDirected)

The beeping that accompanied the regen field shutting off woke Garrus from his nap, half-eaten pouch of  _ drellak  _ strips still in his hand. He looked around blearily and, not seeing Chakwas anywhere, quickly got up and starting pulling on his undersuit, hoping to escape before the doctor reappeared and ordered him back into that spirits-damned uncomfortable bed. Shoving the  _ drellak _ in a pocket, he gathered up his armor and went straight to the men’s head, intent on a shower and stuffing this suit, which definitely had creeper remains on it, into the cleaner. 

His keel felt much better, he noticed as he washed, through the ribs were still bruised and tender. He had to hand it to Chakwas; she treated aliens with as much care and skill as she did her own. He got as clean as he could without the mineral scrub from his kit, then cranked the water a little hotter and just stood under it, letting the heat soothe aching muscles and joints as the cleaner finished its cycle.

He was drying himself with a towel when a couple other crewmen came in, obviously just back from the outpost. They talked in subdued tones as they stripped out of sweaty clothes, tossing the soiled uniforms in the cleaner after Garrus pulled his undersuit out. “We’ll be digging graves all day tomorrow,” one of them said, a man with dark skin and no fringe to speak of. 

“I can’t believe they want to stay after all this shit,” said the other, a lighter brown with a narrow waist and shoulders. “I’d be catching the first boat off this rock.”

“Yeah, well, when you decide a place is home…” The darker man shrugged. “And who knows how much ExoGeni might offer them to keep their mouths shut.”

Garrus paused in pulling his undersuit pants over his spurs, taken aback. “You mean the corporation would give them money to deny what happened here?” 

The lighter-skinned man answered him. “Sure, happens all the time.”

“And the Alliance would let them do that?”

“It’s the kind of thing that always gets framed in language that makes it perfectly legal,” the human explained, “and if the Alliance has any kind of contracts with ExoGeni, they’ll let it go unnoticed as long as important people aren’t dying.”

Garrus snorted, but his subvocals were humming in distress. Maybe this was why Shepard had been so angry at Jeong. Maybe she had known what would happen from the very beginning. He finished dressing, then gathered up his armor again and got on the elevator down to the cargo deck. He pulled his locker out from under a bench and put the armor away, promising himself that he’d see to getting it cleaned up tomorrow. Right now, he was just too tired. 

Then he remembered Shepard vomiting and lying to Chakwas and, with a deep sigh, decided that he should check in on the commander before he checked out for the night.

Shepard wasn’t out in the mess hall talking with the crew that was just coming back in, which suggested she was either sleeping (good) or hiding (bad). He hit the little button on her door’s haptic interface that said he was requesting entry; there was no response, and Garrus again didn’t know if that meant she was sleeping or hiding. Well, if she was asleep, there was nothing wrong with looking in on her, just for his own peace of mind, so, glancing around and finding the crew relatively distracted and dispersing, he brought his omnitool up and hacked the lock, stepping inside quickly when the door slid open and closing it behind him. 

Shepard was not in bed, nor was she immediately visible in the room. Garrus’s mandibles pulled up tight; he was pretty sure he could smell her, but her usual scent was underneath a heavy stink of sharp, bitter fear. His nose twitched and his eyes swept over the room again, noticing a foot just barely peaking out from behind a large cabinet. Garrus rushed over, calling in an urgent if low tone, “Commander, are you alright?”

Shepard was squeezed in between the cabinet and the wall with her knees pulled up to her chest and her head down. A hand fluttered above her head, waving at him. “I’m fine,” she said, voice muffled and wavering. 

Garrus made a sound of disbelief that traveled even into human hearing range. “You are not.”

“Just having a little anxiety attack,” she explained, body heaving as she drew in a sharp breath. “It’ll pass.”

_ Oh, you mean the one that started with the “nervous stomach” while we were still planet-side?  _ Garrus thought.  _ The one that’s been going on for several hours now? Sure, it’ll pass _ … But what he said instead was, “That position cannot be good for your ribs.” 

Shepard’s hand waved him away. “I’m fine, Vakarian,” she said. “I’ll get some sleep soon and be right-as-rain tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t,” he said gently, but firmly, and perhaps for the first time realizing the responsibility she had saddled him with when she had turned over her files. “You’ll be up all night obsessing over this mission or the next one, and even if you weren’t concussed and could take a sedative right now, you most likely wouldn’t because you’re a stubborn  _ claustrum _ who apparently likes to suffer.”

Garrus was hoping to prod her into anger and for a moment he thought it had worked. Her body seemed to tense more, if that was even possible, then she lifted her head, eyes staying glued to the floor. “The sedatives sometimes gave me nightmares,” she said softly, “and when I’m already like this…”

Sighing, Garrus reached out and grabbed her hands, only just now realizing he’d left his gloves behind and kicking himself mentally, but Shepard didn’t seem to notice, just let him haul her to her feet. She sat heavily on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees and shoulders hunched, eyes still downcast. He pulled her desk chair over to sit across from her, then realized he had no idea what to do or say next. “Do you want to talk about it?” he finally asked, deciding that was as safe a move as any. 

She huffed a little laugh. “I mean, I could tell you about the eighty bajillion things going through my head right now but it wouldn’t do any good. It’s just fucked up brain chemicals, you know? Shitty combat crash.” She moaned a little and ducked her head lower, fingers digging into the back of her neck like she was trying to remove her head. “The same things that make me good at my job make me shit in the aftermath.”

“Did this happen after Noveria?” Garrus asked, curious. He’d passed out in the Mako as soon as Chakwas had fixed his shoulder, floating in a sea of pain meds.

“Yeah.”

“And what did you do?”

She finally raised her eyes, looking a little guilty. “I disinfected the gym.”

Garrus blinked. “You disinfected the gym?”

“Yeah.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Did it help?”

She bounced her shoulders. “I wore myself out enough to get a little sleep,” she said.

“And that’s what you need?” he asked. “To sleep?”

“Most of the time, yeah.”

Garrus thought this over as watched one of Shepard’s hands clench and flex, over and over. If they weren’t both so banged up, he’d suggest sparing. If she weren’t both non-turian and his CO, he’d recommend sex, though not necessarily with him, but that would just be awkward.  _ Or, at least, more awkward than this already is _ , he thought. Chemical interventions, including the tried and true method of getting black-out drunk, were out of the question. He wracked his brain, trying to think of other possible solutions. “Anything besides sedatives and physical exertion that helps you sleep?” he asked. “Because Chakwas would have my hide for a new lab uniform if she knew I let you do anything like disinfecting the gym with a concussion and damaged ribs.” The smell of panic was starting to get overwhelming, and watching the way she kept rubbing at the base of her skull made him want to bat her hand away and work the muscle with his larger thumbs, if only to make sure she didn’t hurt herself.

After a long silence, Shepard’s feet shifted nervously. “Rhee, one of the  _ tarin  _ on the  _ Careo _ ?” She waited for him to nod his understanding. “She used to rub my hands when I had a nightmare.”

Garrus’s body went completely still. Even among their own kind, turians tended to wear gloves as a gesture of goodwill; when you had serious weapons literally at your fingertips, direct contact with the hands took a great deal of trust and, consequently, signaled intimacy. The kind of hand massages Shepard was describing usually only happened between lovers and close friends (and the two categories most often overlapped). It wasn’t so much that Garrus was immediately opposed to the notion. He just didn’t know if Shepard knew what she was asking.

Not to mention, in the back of his mind, the psych evaluator’s accusations of xenophilia took on a new significance.

“Forget I said anything,” Shepard said, disrupting his thoughts and sounding seriously embarrassed. “I know that’s not something acquaintances do.”

“No,” he said slowly, “it’s not. But we’re not just acquaintances anymore, right?” He forced his tone into something lighter. “I mean, we’ve shared a meal, shot things together, hated the same man enough to want him dead together, kept secrets from Chakwas together. I think we’re safely bordering on friends now.”

Shepard chuffed. “I’m glad you see it that way. I just feel like I’m corrupting you.”

That made Garrus actually laugh. “Spirits, Shepard! I’m not a little  _ perir _ , away from his  _ mari _ for the first time. Now take off your boots and lay down so I can rub your hands.”

Her hands were shaking as she worked the little strings that kept her shoes on her feet and once she had them off, she look uncertain again. He gestured for her to get on with it, and she slumped sideways in the bed, laying on her side and pulling her knees up to her chest and hiding her face once again. Garrus pulled the chair closer until his knees bumped the bed and he could easily reach her hands without either one of them straining. He picked up one of her limp hands with its too many fingers and dug the pad of his thumb gently into the very center of the palm. “Why do you curl up like that?” he asked. “It can’t be comfortable.”

“It’s not uncomfortable,” she countered, talking toward her stomach, “and it makes me feel less like any second I’m going to just… burst.”

“That’s what it feels like?” He started massaging the place where the first finger met the palm. 

She didn’t answer at first. After a time of silence, she said, “It’s like… it’s like there’s something inside me that doesn’t belong there, and the animal part of my brain believes that if I can get it out, I’ll feel better, so I have these urges to vomit, or cut myself, or smash my head into a wall…”

“Or pry into the back of your neck?”

“Yeah. It’s really dumb, but it’s almost like my body recognizes this feeling as something apart from itself, something it wants to expel.”

Garrus hummed gently, noticing how her shoulders had relaxed a little as she was talking. “Tell me a story,” he said after a pause.

“What?”

“I’m being kind enough to rub your hands, so you can keep me entertained.” Garrus worked his way out to the tip of the finger. “Tell me a human story.”

For several seconds, he thought Shepard was going to deny his request, but apparently she had just been deciding which story to tell. “Once upon a time, on Earth, there was a very rich family that lived in a big city,” she started. “The city had a lot of problems; it was mostly run by crime syndicates that exploited the fact that so many people who lived there were very poor and had no way to leave and very few ways to feed their families.”

“Kind of like Omega.”

“Yeah, kind of like Omega. But this rich family, the Waynes, they tried to help however they could. The father was a doctor, and he opened and funded a lot of clinics so people would have medicine and care. He and his wife raised money for more affordable housing and food banks and stuff like that. They helped whoever they could.

“One night, the Waynes took their son, Bruce, out to see a show and, as they were leaving, they were confronted by a man with a gun. The man wanted their money and the jewelry the mother was wearing. When she fumbled with her necklace, the man panicked and shot her and her husband, then ran away. Bruce watched his parents die, clutching at his mother’s coat until the police arrived.”

“ _ Tarc,  _ Shepard,” Garrus breathed, moving his fingers onto her wrist, working on another finger. 

“You didn’t say you wanted a happy story,” she said, face lifting a little until she could cut her eyes up at him. He made a sound of assent, and she continued. “Bruce grew up in the care of his butler. That’s a man who rich people hire to do things that normal people do for themselves, things like clean and cook and answer the door. The butler’s name was Alfred, and he had lived with the Waynes for a very long time and loved Bruce very much, but Bruce still grew up sad and angry. As he got older, he began to believe that his city could never change because the people charged with enforcing the laws were too often in the pay of the criminals or because police regulations prevented them actually getting the bad guys.”

Garrus snorted derisively. “Yeah, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Shepard gave him a tight smile. “Why do you think I picked this story? Besides the fact that it’s a popular legend among humans and seemed to fit your request.” She adjusted her body slightly, knees straightening a little. “Anyway, when Bruce was old enough, he left home and started to travel. He wanted to see if there were better ways to run a city, but everywhere he found much of the same -- the people who were willing to do terrible things prospered while the innocent and weak and lawful suffered. One night, he tried to stop some men in the middle of a robbery and basically got his ass handed to him, and he decided he would never let that happen again. He used his vast amount of money to take lessons from masters in hand-to-hand combat, in poisons and antidotes, in firearms and non-lethal weapons, in surveillance and espionage -- anything he thought might be useful in his mission to end crime in his city. After many years of training, he returned, eager to begin his work. Each night, he would go out into the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods and wander the streets, looking for thieves and rapists and gangsters, doing whatever he could do stop them. But it wasn’t working like he’d hoped -- he was stopping individuals, sure, but there were always more out there willing to do the same things. People weren’t scared enough of retribution to not commit crimes; they weren’t scared enough of the cops or the courts or the prisons. So he decided he had to give them something else to be scared of.”

She paused to yawn, and Garrus set down the hand he had been working on to pick up the other one.  _ This actually seems to be working _ , he thought, glancing over the lines of her body. Even the bitter tangy scent of fear was retreating. “So what did he give them to be scared of?” he asked, prompting her to continue. 

“The [untranslatable].”

His mandibles flicked. “You’re going to hate this, but my translator didn’t get that.”

She huffed a laugh. “The man who is also a bat. The  _ Batman _ . A bat is a little flying Earth animal. It’s covered in fur and only comes out at night and finds its way through the dark using echolocation instead of its eyes. They’re actually really cute a lot of the time, but a lot of humans at this point in time were afraid of them because there were all these legends about them sucking blood and carrying diseases and sometimes being companions for witches and vampires and stuff.”

“So he made himself into a bat?” Garrus had thought this story was making sense, but now he wasn’t so sure.

“No, but he developed a helmet that would hide his face, to protect his identity as Bruce Wayne, and that had little pointy ears that looked like a bat’s,” Shepard explained. “And he wore a long cape that flowed around him like bat wings when he jumped through the air, and he put a little bat emblem on his chest, to give bad guys a target to shoot at, then put extra plating underneath it. He…” she trailed off to yawn again. “He needed for his actions to all be attributed to one person, to make himself a larger-than-life threat to his city’s underworld. He wanted people to be afraid of him. So he created this… this demigod of the Batman who any second might swoop down on evil-doers to punish them.”

“And he just took it upon himself to punish criminals? No rules?” Garrus’s mandibles pulled up; it was… everything his father had warned him about the Spectres. 

“He had rules, just different rules from the cops. He aimed to disarm and subdued, not kill. He never used guns -- only his hands and other non-lethal weapons like gas grenades and little boomerangs. And he always turned criminals over to the police.” 

Garrus’s mandibles flicked in frustration. “But if he didn’t follow proper procedure, what good did it do to turn them over? They couldn’t make any charges stick!”

Shepard smiled slowly; her breath was becoming smooth and even. “Yeah, that was a problem, but a lot of times these folks would have warrants out for their arrests, but the cops didn’t know where they were, and the Batman could get by with threatening a few people to find out. Ostensibly… the cops were supposed to be… hunting the Batman down…” Garrus kept rubbing the commander’s wrist, wondering about all the small bones he could feel under his fingers, as she pressed on in her tale. “Because vigilantism was against the law… but some of the cops like the Batman… and eventually…” She swallowed sleepily. “Eventually one of them got put in charge of the police in the city…”

“I thought you said this story wasn’t happy,” Garrus teased softly.

“That’s not the end of it,” she slurred. “Still more… more sad stuff… like Jason…” 

“You can tell me about Jason next time, alright?”

“M-kay.”

The  _ torin  _ stayed there, kept pressing his thumb lightly into her palm, until he was sure she was well and deeply asleep. Then, he managed to fold at least half a blanket over her -- the other half was trapped under her body -- and cut off the light as he left the cabin.

As he drifted off himself, down in the Mako, he thought that is was little surprise that so many humans joined up with merc units if they had legends about vigilantes. Some of them probably even thought they were on the right side of justice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So why, you might be asking yourself, is Shepard telling Garrus the story of Batman?
> 
> a) Because I don't know that I'd trust Garrus to come up with the Archangel idea on his own.
> 
> b) My favorite scene from Reign of Fire is when the adults are telling the kids the story of Star Wars, and I think a lot about really popular stories like that will be remembered centuries from now. 
> 
> c) Y'all, I just like the Batfam so much.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, in Kuraiummei's lovely story "Either Die a Hero," Garrus massages Saren's hands to help him sleep, and I just loved that so much that I stole it, shamelessly. 
> 
> Up next: Shepard talks sex with an OC.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All y'all with your kudos and your thoughtful comments... thank you so much. 
> 
> So, I've been nervous about posting this chapter because there's a lot of Shepard back-story stuff, including two OCs and some other stuff. So, yeah.
> 
> GLOSSARY:  
> torin/tarin: male/female turian above the age of majority (MizDirected)

Emily, who had grown up on Mars, gone to the University of Schiaparelli, and double-majored in anthropology and philosophy. Who had joined the Alliance entirely out of curiosity, determined to learn more about alien cultures and peoples. Who had introduced herself to Jane at the Assana Museum of Antiquities on Thessia even though they’d been in the same platoon for months.

Emily, with her dark skin and carefully shaved head, with her penchant for gold rings and old books, ones still made of paper. With her sharp, dark eyes and her bright white teeth that always peeked from behind her lips when she was explaining something she found fascinating. 

Emily, who had never made Jane feel embarrassed about her lack of education, who gave her texts and vids and would talk until late in the night about what it might mean that most sentient races were bipedal and what elcor performances of Shakespeare could reveal about values and ideas that might be universal. 

Emily, who had given her the book on Tuchanka and krogan cultural practices that had saved her life.

Emily, who would gasp her name in the dark, clutching her hair, coming against her tongue. Who would kiss her neck and her ears and whisper how beautiful she was, all the while working her clit with clever fingers.

Emily, whose body was never recovered…

Jane jerked away, fumbling with the blankets but not making a sound until she was sure she was alone. She took a deep noisy breath in her nose, then blew it through her lips, suddenly feeling aware of how damp she was all over, but especially between her legs. She closed her eyes tight and flopped back on her pillow, taking another deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. 

She hadn’t dreamed about Emily in a long time. It felt… strange. Maybe Vakarian rubbing her hands had brought back memories of Rhee, which had brought back memories of dreaming of Emily…

Jane rubbed her eyes. Didn’t matter. Psychoanalyzing herself rarely got her anywhere anyway. 

She checked her chronometer, surprised to find she slept through nearly the entire night cycle. She’d need to see to things in the colony today and log a report with the Council, but that could wait a little while yet. First, she needed to get her brain back on track, free of cobwebs and ghosts.

After pulling on a sports bra, shirt, and leggings, Jane put on a pair of running shoes and headed down to the make-shift gym. The open deck with its mats and weights and equipment was currently empty, which suited Jane just fine, and she started an easy lope around the outer edge after cueing up some music on her ‘tool. At first, her ribs complained at the jostling, but after about half a klick her ragged breathing smoothed out and she just focused on putting one foot in front of the other. 

At some point, Vakarian came in and started working a punching bag with those open-handed hits that turians favored in hand-to-hand. Jane ignored him -- she was neither ready to talk about last night nor to pretend it hadn’t happened. She went another klick, pushing up her pace in time with the music coming through her implants, then another, slowing down. She glanced back over at the punching bag; Wrex had joined the  _ torin _ and was watching his form. She could hear laughter over the music. 

Jane slowed down to a walk as the playlist ended, suddenly taken with an idea. “Hey Wrex,” she called, heading toward them. “I got a little problem I need your help with.”

The krogan heaved a longsuffering sigh. “What do you want now, Shepard?” As she got closer, Wrex wrinkled his snout. “You stink,” he spat.

“I thought you liked the smell of the battlefield,” she quipped back, all too aware of how ripe she probably was.

“This is beyond a good fight,” Wrex said. “You reek like… I don’t even know what.”

She rolled her eyes. “Duly noted. So here’s the thing: krogan always want to get in close, but I’m too small and too weak to do much about them once they’re all up in my business. How do I get them out of my business, Wrex?”

He huffed a laugh. “Have you tried a kick in the quad?”

“Of course I tried a kick in the quad,” she said. “Too much armor.”

“Have you tried being better at hand-to-hand?” Vakarian drawled. 

She turned a cool eye to him. “Says the  _ torin  _ who resorted to letting a krogan mow him down and shooting repeatedly in his belly,” she sneered. But his mandibles were fluttering, and Jane grinned a little. Not awkward at all that he’d seen her turn into a hopeless, heaving mess. Nope, not even a little.

She turned back to Wrex. “Look, old man, I’m looking for a low blow, something they won’t see coming that’ll buy me enough time to get a few meters between us.”

“Now, Shepard,” Wrex said with a wicked grin, “what makes you think I’d know anything about such dishonorable tactics? Or that I’d share them with you?”

“I think you know them because you’re still alive,” Shepard answered, planting her hands on her hips, “and I think you’ll share them because there’s a routine possibility that I’ll be the one of your six. Besides,” she cajoled, “the females of my species have a long history of exploiting every dirty trick in the book, so you can rest assured that any knowledge you impart to me will be put to good use.”

Wrex made a show of thinking it over, then shook his head. “Alright, but only because you’re so small and useless anyway.” He lifted a hand and placed the tip of a claw on a spot just under his head plate. “This spot, between the nostrils, is sensitive. You get a good poke in, it’ll hurt enough to make his eyes water and rattle his cage, but it’s not easy to get to, cause you gotta get right under the plate.” Wrex shrugged and lowered his hand. “You got those tiny fingers, though, so you can probably make it work.”

In response, Jane flattened a hand and reached out until her fingers were just touching Wrex’s snout. “Here?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Wrex said, eyes crossing a little as he watched her.  _ Probably not a good idea to go in with a finger jab _ , Jane thought.  _ Too much chance of breaking my fingers against the plate. But a gun barrel could work nicely. Or even just smashing my thumb into it in a pinch. _ She tried it, pressing with her thumb. Wrex jumped back with a roar. “Fuck, Shepard!” he spat. “You’re not supposed to use it on me!”

“Sorry, Wrex,” she said, genuinely apologetic. “Didn’t know how much pressure it would take. I won’t do it again unless you make me.”

Wrex covered his snout with his hands and muttered behind them as he eyed her malevolently. 

“Good job, Commander,” Vakarian said. “I’ve never seen a krogan that close to crying.”

Wrex snarled. “How about you let her jab all your tender bits, turian.” 

Vakarian shifted his weight and crossed his arms, baring his teeth in a smile. “I’m not stupid enough to stand around and point them out.”

Wrex growled and Jane stepped in between them. “Don’t worry, Wrex,” she soothed. “I already know all of Vakarian’s tender bits. I’ll put him on his ass next time he hurts your feelings.”

Wrex huffed and grumbled and stalked away. Jane looked over her shoulder at the  _ torin _ , whose mandibles had pulled up in something that looked a little like worry. “Would you really kick a spur?” he asked.

“Without thinking twice, if you weren’t a friend,” she answered, stretching her arms over her head. “Do I really smell that bad?” 

“Like something a varren dragged in.” 

Jane hummed in acknowledgement. “I picked up some data off a geth terminal yesterday,” she said, changing the topic. “I’d like for you and Tali to take a look at it.” She manipulated her ‘tool to send him the packet, and his ‘tool pinged in response. 

“Sure thing, Commander,” Vakarian responded, opening his ‘tool to see what she’d given him. “What’s the plan now?”

“We’ll spend the day cycle here, then head for Trident to resupply and drop off anyone who wants to hitch a ride,” she answered, already walking toward the elevator. 

“Then Virmire?” 

“Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “I need to make a few calls first.”

He nodded then turned back to his ‘tool. Jane appreciated that he didn’t ask how she was, but, of course, the fact that she wasn’t in the fetal position probably told him everything he needed to know.

It was still several hours before she got around to those calls. First she had to shower, then she toured the colony with Alenko, spreading word that anyone who wanted transportation to Trident was welcome to ride along. Things on the ground were rough, especially with all the Thorian samples that were being hauled from underground and the bodies that still needed to be buried, but Juliana reported that ExoGeni had a relief team scheduled to arrive in around 36 Terran hours, so Jane didn’t feel too bad about pulling out. 

Back on the ship, she wrote up her report for the Council, including all the data on the Thorian they had managed to collect thus far. After stating that Saren had taken the Cipher then apparently ordered the geth to attack the outpost, Jane decided against offering any conclusions, wondering instead what the Councillors might make of it, or at least what they might tell her they made of it. Once the report was posted, marked high priority and away through a comm buoy, Jane took another look at the intel she’d been given on Virmire, what little of it there was: an STG unit had gone out to chase a lead on Saren, then sent back a garbled message. The Council speculated the unit was in trouble only because the message was garbled. Otherwise, all Jane could find out was that Virmire was a lush dextro-amino world with a spare number of turian settlements and a reputation for being inhospitable, another Invictus if some critics of the colonists were to be believed. 

Jane considered her options. The contents of any request she made of an information broker were likely to just be sold again, and Saren would know she was coming. And what she really needed was for someone to get eyes on the ground, not just the kind of extranet traffic a broker would monitor. She pulled up her ‘tool and composed a quick message under her private ID.

 

FROM: 04271988615 // ID.code: amockingbirdlistens

TO: 12245891231 // ID.code: appleofyoureye

 

_ Hey Rhee, I know it’s been a while, but I need a favor and didn’t know who else to ask. Give me a call? --J _

 

END MSSG

 

After that was sent, Jane switched back over to her Alliance-issued alias and sent a couple of requests to information brokers for intel on ExoGeni shipments and facilities. Let Saren think she was still tied up in understanding the Thorian, and besides, she would really like to know about all the pies ExoGeni had their sticky little fingers in. 

She was just pulling up the geth data on her terminal when her omnitool alerted her to an incoming call. She opened the screen already grinning. “Hey, Rhee!” she said.

“Hey yourself, Jane,” a dark-faced _tarin_ with sky blue markings replied, mandibles spread wide and all her teeth showing. “Or is it _Spectre Shepard_ now, as the rumors suggest?”

Jane shrugged. “Fancy new title, same old job.”

“Better pay, I hope.” 

“Only if I live long enough to collect it.”

Rhee laughed and Jane’s grin only got bigger. God, she had missed her. “So, how are things on  _ Careo _ ?” 

“Oh, same as usual,” the  _ tarin _ said. “Jalleck retired and I’m first mate now.”

“Look at you, finally taking some responsibility,” Jane teased. “Your mother would be proud.”

Rhee made a noise of exasperation. “My mother would like me to come home with a good mate to pop out a few children and continue the Alvados family name.” 

“Are you still getting the semiannual messages?”

“Oh we’re up to four a year now, and she’s started counting down to her death.”

Jane furrowed her brows. “Is she sick or something? I didn’t think she was that old.”

“She’s not,” Rhee answered. “She’s just getting desperate for company that doesn’t leave as soon as the reverie has worn off.” Her mandibles flicked excitedly. “Though we might have a kid around here soon enough.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, well, Nadia and Bresol decided they were ready to really settle down, start a family, that kind of thing, but then Bresol was killed in what was supposed to be his last mission.”

“Oh shit,” Jane said. Bresol had been a grizzled veteran when she’d started on the  _ Careo _ ; the possibility of the  _ torin  _ dying seemed laughable.

“But Nadia had already conceived,” Rhee explained. “They had been planning on going back to Macedyn, to Bresol’s family, but Nadia didn’t want to go alone and she doesn’t really have anybody else -- her mom died before she reached matriarch and she never knew her father. So Hestra told Nadia she could retire from combat and stay onboard helping with logistics and acquisitions as long as she wants, and that little asari  _ petri  _ will grow up with a shipful of aunts and uncles.”

“And she’s going to stay?”

“She’s gonna try it, see how well it goes for a bit.”

Jane chuckled. “That kid is going to grow up spoiled if she does.” 

“Yeah, well,” Rhee said, dipping her head in a shrug, “it’ll be good for us all, I think. Make us feel like a real family.”

Jane hummed in agreement. 

“So what about you? You still doing the all-human ship thing?”

Jane shrugged. “I’ve actually made it onto a jointly designed human-turian ship,” she said, “and approximately fifteen percent of my crew is non-human.”

“Oh wow, fifteen percent,” Rhee said. Jane didn’t need to hear the subvocals to hear the sarcasm. “At least tell me that you’re getting laid regularly.”

“Aw, c’mon Rhee…”

“I’m serious!” the  _ tarin  _ asserted. “You’re going to get all stressed out and bent out of shape and no one will want to be around you. Now don’t tell me that on a ship full of your own kind, none of them are sexy and up for a fuck.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “Rhee, you know it doesn’t work that way for me. Besides, I’m the commanding officer on this ship,” Jane explained, exasperated. “I can’t have sex with anyone under my command. It’s against Alliance regs.”

“Okay, what about the non-humans?” Rhee went on. “They aren’t Alliance.”

“Well,” Jane said slowly, “there’s a krogan…”

“That’s a no.”

“A quarian…”

“Lot of risk.”

“An asari…”

“Better…”

“And a turian.”

“Well there ya go!” Rhee said, bursting with enthusiasm. “Now you just march right up to him or her and tell them you’d like to have sex. Problem solved.”

Jane leaned her head back and made a frustrated noise. “He doesn’t strike me as the type that’s into xeno.” When she looked back at the holo, Rhee was grinning in a way that felt vaguely predatory. “What?” she asked, suddenly feeling a little frightened. 

“That wasn’t a ‘Oh, Rhee, you know I’m not sexually interested in people unless I form an emotional connection’ or even an ‘Oh, Rhee, I can’t even tell if she’s hot or not because she’s such a bitch,’” Rhee gushed, her imitation of Jane a little overdramatic. “I think you like him.”

Jane shrugged. “Yes, I like him. He’s a good soldier. Reliable. Gets shit done. Puts up with me being weird.”

“But you don’t think he’s hot.” It was a statement instead of a question.

“I don’t know,” Jane said. “You know me. I’m not repulsed by him. I just haven’t paid attention.”

“Alright, alright,” Rhee said, mandibles stilling in a way that said she’d back off. “Demisexuals are weird.”

Jane smiled. “Allosexuals are weird,” she sniped back. “And you’re the weirdest one of all.”

One of the  _ tarin _ ’s mandibles flicked cockily, sending the rings piercing it chiming. “You never complained.”

“No,” Jane admitted. “No, I did not.” She cleared her throat. “Now, if you’re done berating me about my lack of sex life…”

“Well, if you’d call more often, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time on the important stuff.”

“You could call me, you know.”

“Yeah,” Rhee said sheepishly, “but I was always a little worried I’d get you in trouble.”

“Well, I’m my own master now, so you can call whenever you like. But this time, I really do need a favor.”

“Alright, shoot.”

“I need to hire a ship and crew to do some fly-bys of Virmire, in Sentry Omega.”

Rhee grimaced. “I hate to tell you this, Jane, but we’re nowhere near that part of space…”

“I didn’t figure you were,” Jane interrupted, “but I’d like to keep my even-more-famous than usual name out of it as much as possible, two or three times removed if possible.”

“Oh,” Rhee said, “well that I can do. What do you want? Just general scans?”

“Any large energy sources that aren’t previously mapped settlements,” Jane clarified. “I’d love holos, but if those aren’t feasible, scans will do.”

“Price range?”

“You know what that kind of work should cost. Let me know as soon as you’ve got a contractor and I’ll send you the funds.”

“Alright, I’ll let you know when I get some bites. Might take a few days though.” 

“Yeah, I kinda figured,” Jane said. “We’ll keep busy.” Looking at the  _ tarin  _ on the holo, sweeps of blue and glints of gold on her face, Jane felt her chest collapse in something like homesickness. “It’s good to see you, Rhee.”

Rhee’s smile was a little bittersweet as well. “You too, Jane. Next time you get some leave, let me know. We’ll take a little vacation together, drink too much, and have amazing sex, all on the Council’s credit.”

Jane barked a laugh. “Yeah, I’ll do that. Talk to you soon.”

“Bye, Jane.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I know that Rhee probably doesn't know or care what an apple is, but when she started bumming around my head, she brought the ID appleofyoureye with her and refused to let it go.
> 
> Also, curious about Shepard's playlist for running?
> 
> Jucifer - “Amplifier”   
> This song from the early 21st century would have gone the way of all those other things lost forever in the digital archives of human culture had it not been discovered and subsequently covered by the all-biotic band Warp Tour (the name being a reference to the Alliance’s practice of “strongly encouraging” human biotics to complete at least one combat tour after their time at Brain Camp and, more obscurely, to a musical event from the previous century). The song became so popular among the biotoic subculture that “eight ball” became a slang term for a poorly crafted or malfunctioning amp, which were all too common in the Earth black market and could result in serious injury or death.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends. So, I'm sorry about the delay here. School started again last week, and I'm having to get back into teaching mind-space. Plus, the presidential inauguration here in the States has me a bit out of sorts. So I'm moving slower with the writing and posting than I was before, but I'm really hoping things will settle down in another week or so. Thanks for sticking with me and my weirdo Shepard.
> 
> GLOSSARY
> 
> torin: male turian over the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> tarc: a turian expletive that's the rough equivalent of "crap" (MizDirected)

Shepard called the ground team to the comm room for a debriefing as soon as Joker had them out of atmo. Garrus looked the commander over as he sat down, stretching his legs out in front of him. All sign of the meltdown was… gone. If anything, she looked well-rested and alert, despite a little bruising on her face. And she smelled, well, human-scented, normal.

Liara, though, was apparently seeing something different. “Commander?” she said as she came in. “You look… pale. Are you suffering any ill effects from the Cipher?”

Shepard waved her hand idly. “Shook me up a bit,” she said. “It was a lot to take in.”

“I might be able to help you,” Liara offered. “I am an expert on the Protheans. If I join my consciousness to yours, maybe we can make some sense of it.”

“Yeah, alright.” Shepard stood and moved closer to the scientist. “If you think it’ll help.”

Garrus watched as Liara melded with Shepard without the hokey mystical speech that Shiala had used. From the outside, it looked like the two of them were just standing there, looking at each other, until Garrus’s eyes dropped to Shepard’s hand, which was slowly clenching and flexing.

After a minute, Liara jerked out of her trance. “That was incredible!” she gasped. “All this time, all my research, I never dreamed --” She seemed to realize she was babbling. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing up at Shepard. “The images were so vivid. I never imagined the experience would be so… intense.”

“Could you make sense of it?” Shepard asked, now rubbing her thumb aggressively against her fingertips instead of wadding the whole hand into a fist.

“The beacon on Eden Prime must have damage,” Liara explained. “The message you received was incomplete. There are large gaps.”

“So nothing useful?” The hand clenched again.

“Only confirmations of what we already knew. The Protheans were wiped out by a race of sentient machines.” Liara crossed one arm over her chest to hold the opposite elbow, bringing a hand to her chin. “I think it’s obvious that there’s a connection between the Reapers, the Prothean extinction, and the Conduit. But I didn’t see anything that would help us find it. However, I suspect that Saren has the complete message, which would suggest that he found another beacon. If we could--”

Liara suddenly swooned, Alenko jumping up behind her to hold her up. “You alright?” he asked, a little too concerned.

Garrus’s mandibles fluttered. Watching Alenko negotiate flirting with an asari maiden would be… entertaining.

“I’m sorry,” Liara said, one hand covering her eyes. “The joining is exhausting. I should go lie down.” 

Shepard nodded her head in a dismissal. “Take it easy, alright?”

Alenko reluctantly let go of Liara as she headed out of the comm room, hand still on her head. Shepard sat back down, smoothly a hand along her thigh. “Alright,” she said, looking around the group, “we've got a few things to cover. Alenko and Williams, final update on the colony.”

“Juliana seemed to think that ExoGeni would be willing to continue funding the colony for a time in order to keep the colonists from suing,” Williams said, leaning forward a little. “They're gonna start putting the pressure on as soon as that relief ship arrives.”

Shepard nodded but her frown deepened a little.

“They’re also planning on sending some expeditions down to explore the extent of the Thorian’s growth,” Alenko added, “see what they can recover of the remains and make sure there aren’t others lurking around. Juliana said she’d pass on anything they could to us.”

“Good,” Shepard said. “I’ve got this little niggling feeling in the back of my head that the Thorian was more important than just an archive of ‘Prothean endemic ancestral memory’.” Garrus’s mandibles fluttered again; her impression of Shiala was laced with all the disdain he himself felt.

“What do you mean, Shepard?” Tali asked. 

The commander interlocked her fingers in front of her, resting her elbows on her knees. “How many sentient species have been discovered in our galaxy?” she asked.

There was a long pause. “That’s… not an easy question to answer,” Garrus said slowly. “There are a number of races that haven’t yet achieved space flight, and even more that show the potential for sentience…”

“And how many of those are hive-minded?” Shepard asked, looking at him.

Garrus began to see where this was going. “Very, very few,” he answered, “and we’ve encountered two during this mission.”

Shepard nodded. “Maybe just coincidence.” She shrugged. “Maybe not, and we’re not in a position to overlook anything.”

Wrex harrumphed. “What does this have to do with Saren?”

“It doesn’t,” Shepard said shortly. “It has to do with the Reapers. They are the real threat here. Saren and the geth are just symptoms.” Her eyes moved around the room, boring into each of them. “Do not forget that.” She took a deep breath, relaxing her body. “Tali and Garrus, were you able to do anything with that data?”

Garrus glanced over to Tali, giving her a little nod. The quarian looked back to the commander and opened her omnitool. “It was a record of transmissions regarding troop movements. What we were able to decrypt suggests that the geth are amassing troops in the Armstrong Cluster to serve as a staging ground for further incursions into the Traverse.”

Shepard’s eyebrows moved up her forehead. “What kind of numbers we talking about here?”

Garrus grimaced. “It’s hard to tell, but there’s mention of at least a dozen drop ships.”

Shepard grimaced back. “That’s significant.” She sighed heavily. “Alright, we’re going to resupply on Trident, then we’ll go take a look at what’s going on in the Armstrong Cluster. I’ve got some feelers out for intel on Virmire, but it’s going to take time for that to get back to me. Might as well take out some geth while we’re waiting.” She took another deep breath. “Any other news? Concerns? Questions?” She looked around the room again, leaving a long silence, that was interrupted by Joker. “Hey Commander,” he said over the intercom. “The Council is calling. Want me to patch them through?”

She looked over the group again, but Garrus was already getting to his feet, the others following his lead. As he left the comm room, he overheard Shepard say, “Patch them through, Joker.”

After telling Tali that they could pick up the data decryption the next day, Garrus went back down to the cargo hold with Wrex. He felt both relief and a whole new kind of apprehension churning through his gizzard. On the one hand, the commander was back to being the commander -- determined, focused, entirely collected. Well, apart from her discomfort with Liara’s mind-meld, but he couldn’t really blame her for that. On the other hand, Shepard had just forced them to confront the fact that this mission was much more complicated than they may want to believe. Pushing back the geth? Can do. Chasing down the  _ torin  _ who may historically be the smartest and most ruthless of the Council’s Spectres? With pleasure. 

Try to figure out why a race of sentient machine seems to be especially interested in hive-minded organic life? 

Flaming  _ tarc  _ on a stick, that was not Garrus’s area of expertise.

Wrex seemed to notice his distress. “You shitting in your shorts, turian?” the krogan rumbled.

Garrus snorted. “Just wondering if I’m the best  _ torin  _ for the job.”

Wrex shrugged, a gesture the shifted his entire hump. “She brought you on board to shoot things, Vakarian, and you’re pretty decent at that.

Garrus’s mandibles flicked in a cocky grin. “High praise coming from you.”

But the problem hung around in the back of his mind as Garrus bedded down for the night cycle, as he got up hours later, as he worked the punching bag in the gym, as he sat down with Tali to continue their decryption project. The quarian was agitated as she manipulated her ‘tool at a speed Garrus envied a little. “I’ve managed to decrypt two more transmissions,” she said without looking up at him. 

“Any new details?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just more of the same.”

“You’re, uh, really focused on this,” the  _ torin _ said, examining Tali’s hunched posture out of the corner of his eye. 

She looked up at him, and even behind her mask, he could see that her eyes were brighter than usual. “This is more data on the geth than my people have been able to collect in a century,” she said, a little in awe. “And who know what else we might find when we hit their bases.” She ducked her head, body language becoming sheepish. “It would make a worthy Pilgrimage gift.”

Garrus’s mandibles clicked in agreement. “I suppose it would.” 

They worked through a few more decryption protocols, but it quickly became apparent that Garrus was just getting in the way. He left the engineer to her work and headed up to the crew deck, thinking he might find a snack. Shepard was slouched against the table with a cup of something next to her, so Garrus found a ration pouch and joined her.

“Hey, Commander,” he greeted, sliding in a seat across from her.

Shepard stifled a yawn. “Hey yourself,” she said, glancing up at him, then back to her omnitool’s readout.

“What are you working on?” he asked, seeing the holos Liara had taken of the geth altar from the ExoGeni building.

“I’ve got some theories about what this thing might have been,” she said, manipulating her ‘tool to pull up some charts. “I had Chakwas give me the data she collected on us after our exposure --”

“Hey! Doctor-patient confidentiality!” Garrus exclaimed, with a little teasing subvocal. 

Shepard’s eyes did that thing where they followed something on the ceiling ( _ Rolling?  _ he thought.  _ Is that what they mean when they say someone rolled their eyes? _ ). “It’s not like she gave me your STI treatment plan, Vakarian,” she replied. “Just some info on how much Thorian mind-control dust we inhaled. And,” she gestured to the readout, “you and I had pretty comparable levels. Tali had none, unsurprising given her suit, and Liara just had trace amounts.”

Garrus looked over the chart. “But Liara was out there just as long as we were,” he said. “Why the difference?”

“Chakwas thinks it has to do with metabolism. She took a look at Alenko and Wrex too, since they were out in it the same amount of time. Alenko had significantly higher levels, so she says that the slower metabolism of krogan and asari probably slows down the process.”

Garrus’s brow plates drew together. “So, you and I heard noises from that glowing orb, and we had comparable levels of Thorian spores…”

“Which leads me to believe that one purpose of this device might have been to repel Thorian creepers and other minions.” 

His mandibles fluttered. “That’s a bit of a stretch, Shepard.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, well, it makes more sense than synthetics suddenly deciding to build altars.”

“Yeah, about that…” Garrus’s hand found the back of his neck. “Look, I’m feeling a little out of my depth here,” he confessed. He added a weak chuckle. “I mean, being a C-Sec investigator usually didn’t require figuring out the motivations of mythical machine races that possess people.”

Shepard gave a dry chuckle of her own. “Yeah, documenting slaver routes in the Terminus didn’t exactly prepare me for this kind of xenopological work either.” She was silent for a moment. “Right now,” she finally said, “we have an immediate problem in front of us: Saren. Anything else we can pick up along the way, any intel or insights, is icing on top of the cake.”

“Uh…” Garrus’s brow plates shifted together. “I kind of know what a cake is…”

“It means that it’s extra,” Shepard said, “bonus. Tasty, but not as necessary as getting Saren. So we’ll keep our eyes and our ears open, we’ll make some contacts that can help us, and you’ll watch my six when I get suddenly distracted by glowing orbs.” The corners of her lips were turned up just a hair, then she changed the subject. “I’ve requested that the Council turn over all of Saren’s reports. They are… reticent.”

“You’re hoping to find some sign of indoctrination?” Garrus asked, pleased that he was catching onto Shepard’s plans more quickly.

“Yeah,” she said, then she looked down as her omnitool pinged a new message alert. Garrus leaned back as she read it, wondering what kinds of things might indicate indoctrination in a Spectre as notorious as Saren. Less regard for civilian lives? More vagueness in his reports? Maybe they could get Kryik’s reports too, see if he had mentioned anything about his mentor’s behavior.

“Well hot damn,” Shepard blurted. “Our little stunt with Barla Von has paid off.”

Garrus’s mandibles flared in excitement. “Another information broker?”

“Looks that way,” Shepard said. She hit the comms in her ear. “Hey Joker, what’s our ETA on Trident?” She listened to the helmsman’s answer, then said to Garrus, “Alright, I’ll arrange a meeting at some out-of-the-way bar in New Cousteau and we’ll see what this mysterious messenger has to say.” She glanced up at him. “We’ll just have to figure out where the non-humans go.”

“Do I get to dress up again?” he drawled in response.

She smirked back. “Think you can handle single-turian-looking-to-get-laid, C-Sec?”

Garrus scoffed. “Only every day of my life.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME:  
> Wrex gives Pressly a black eye. No joke.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, I'm back. I had given up on myself and didn't believe in my heart that I could do this, but folks are still finding and commenting on this fic, so dammit, I'm gonna keep pushing on. I haven't written smutty scenes in ME 2 and ME 3 for them to languish in my google drive!
> 
> New goal is for updates every Wednesday.
> 
> Also, I've been going back over the previous chapters, correcting typos, polishing some prose, making the html do what I want within my limited abilities (now if you hover over a glossary word, a definition pops up!). No major changes, though, so don't fret.
> 
> And as promised, we start with Pressly getting punched in the face...
> 
>  
> 
> GLOSSARY:
> 
> torin: male turian of the age of majority (MizDirected)
> 
> stabata: a long, narrow, nine stringed instrument strummed with both hands. Due to its many resonance chambers, and the movable flanges within, it is capable of intricate sympathetic harmonics similar to turian subvocals (MizDirected)

"First you brought all the aliens on board!" Pressly shouted. "Then you let them poke around wherever they want on the ship! And now you're throwing Alliance regulation out the window!" 

Jane was pretty sure the vein at his temple was about to burst, which would only make matters worse for his face. In all honestly, she wanted to laugh; what did the idiot think would happen when he tried to separate a krogan from his ryncol? Instead, she glared at him as his shoulders heaved and his nostrils flared, keeping her tone cool. "Pressly, it's past time for you to accept that there are no regulations on this ship except _my regulations_. Before you answer to the Alliance, you answer to _me_." She paused and shifted her weight. "You're a damn good XO and I would hate to lose you, but if you're going to take the fucking ban on alcohol as your last stand, I need you _off my fucking ship_ , because we have much bigger concerns." She turned and strode toward the door. "We hit Trident in twelve hours. You can give me your decision then." 

She headed straight for the elevator as she left the medbay, where she finally let herself huff a laugh. Pressly's eyes were going to be black for a while, and she wasn't sure his nose would heal back straight either unless Chakwas worked a miracle. Hell, he was lucky Wrex hadn't smashed the cartilage back into his brain and killed him. Jane shook her head, sighing. She knew she should have headed this problem off weeks ago, but it had seemed like such a small thing when the galaxy was at stake… 

"Commander!" Williams was in her face as soon as the elevator door opened. "This isn't a sick joke, is it?" 

"I meant what I said," Jane reiterated, starting down the cargo deck. "Alcohol is not longer prohibited, but anyone showing up for their shift incapacitated will answer to me." 

"But --" 

"Back to your station, chief!" Jane snapped. Williams retreated and she made her way to the stacked crates that Wrex had built into his own little fortress. The krogan was seated on a box, the bottle of ryncol that had started the whole fiasco still in his hand. He sneered when she rounded the corner. "Let's get one thing straight," he said. "I don't give a fuck about your human rules--" 

Jane stepped right up between his legs and looked down at him, pressing her body up against his. "If you _ever_ assault a member of my crew again," she growled, "I will vent you." 

Wrex rumbled a laugh, but his eyes darted around a bit. "I'd like to see you try." 

She gave a predatory smile. "You sleep in the damn cargo hold, Wrex. It's all too easy." Then, she stepped back and leaned against the makeshift wall, grinning in a much friendlier way. "Still, Pressly looking like a raccoon for a week? Definitely worth having to listen to him rave about aliens and regulations." 

"I don't know what a raccoon is," Wrex said, looking like he was confused about more than the strange term. 

"It's a dumb-looking Earth animal with big black spots around its eyes," Jane explained. 

"Oh." The krogan seemed to refocus. "I still don't give a fuck about your human rules or you changing them, so you can take your empty gesture and shove it up your ass." 

Jane sighed. "I'd actually been meaning to change the regs for a while. Try to remind the crew that we aren't an Alliance ship any more, boost moral, keep them from going quite so crazy on shore leave…" She trailed off with a shrug. 

"Whatever," Wrex said, turning his gaze away from her. 

Jane sighed again. She liked Wrex. He could be a total asshole, but in the field he took orders, and it was fun to antagonize him. But she had never gotten the impression that he felt like part of her crew the same way Vakarian and Tali did. Maybe it was because he was a mercenary, had been for a while, but this little run-in with Pressly probably just confirmed to him that he was barely tolerated on this ship. 

"Why did you become a mercenary?" she asked on a sudden impulse. 

Wrex snorted. "Lots of reasons." 

"Such as?" Jane pressed. 

The krogan turned his gaze back to her. "Such as… I need to get out of our system. I needed to eat. I needed to survive." 

"Why not stay and help your people?" Jane had heard Wrex talk enough about the evils of the genophage to know he still felt some sense of responsibility toward the krogan. 

"I tried to help. That's why I had to leave." 

Jane crossed her arms over her chest; getting anything out of Wrex was like pulling teeth. "What happened?" 

Wrex gave a long-suffering sigh that said that he was only doing this because it was less work than breaking her face. "I was betrayed," he explained. "I was head of a small tribe. We were trying to restore order after the war, but the other tribes were against us. They followed Jarrod, one of the few warlords who survived the war with the turians. But he was old, and so were his ideas. He wanted to continue the war. He wanted us to fight: turians, salarians, each other. It didn't matter who as long as we were fighting." 

"What did you want?" Jane asked. 

"I just wanted Jarrod to shut up," Wrex grumbled after taking another pull from his ryncol bottle, "to stop his ranting. I wanted him to stop leading the tribes astray. But he couldn't understand how much things had changed." His tone got a little softer. "We didn't have the numbers to go to war. Even if we did, the genophage made sure we couldn't replenish our numbers fast enough. I told them all to forget about war. We needed to focus on breeding. At least for one generation. And for a while, we were getting through. Some of the tribes started coming around." 

"I take it the warlord didn't appreciate that." 

"No," the krogan said, sarcastic, "he didn't. He arranged a Crush with the tribes. A meeting on neutral ground. He wanted to talk. We met at the Hollows, near the graves of our ancestors. The skulls of our dead laid bare to remind us of where we come from, and where we all go. It's as sacred as any krogan place can be. Violence is forbidden." 

"Sounds like a trap to me," Jane said drily. "You must've suspected as much." 

He gave her his what-do-you-take-me-for glare, then said, "I did. But when your father invites you to a Crush… well, there are some laws even we hold sacred." 

"Shit," Jane spat, "Jarrod was your father?" 

"He was," Wrex sneered, "until that day. We talked. But we didn't get anywhere. When it was clear that I wouldn't join him, he gave the signal. His men leapt from the graves of our ancestors like krogan undead. The few that were loyal to me died quickly. I escaped with my life. But not before I sank my dagger deep into my father's chest. That is why I left. And that's why I'll never go back." 

Jane didn't say anything for a while, mulling this over. That kind of family baggage would make it hard to return, but she wasn't convinced that Wrex was as resigned to his fate as he pretended. "You must have family other than your father," she said slowly, wondering if there might be a sore canine she could prod. "Don't you miss them?" 

Wrex barked a laugh. "You trying to make me cry, Shepard? I've got some unfinished business with my family. But that's all." 

"What kind of business?" _Let's see if we can work a few more teeth loose..._

The krogan gave her a hooded look before answering. "Before I left, I made an oath to my father's father. I swore to recover my family's battle armor. It was taken from him after the uprising." 

Jane's face twisted in confusion. "What's so important about this armor?" 

"It's a relic -- fucking useless, really," Wrex said. "But it was worn by five generations of my family before the war. It's rightfully mine." His eyes gleamed with possessiveness. "Originally it was taken by the turian military. We weren't allowed armor or weapons after the war. Now, it's in the hands of Tonn Actus, a turian scum who collects relics from the war. He's made millions selling krogan artifacts that were stolen from my people. He's got several bases where he stores his goods. All fortified and guarded. I just don't know which base has my family's armor." 

"So you just gonna hit all of them, one by one, until you find it?" Jane asked. 

Wrex shrugged. "Seemed like as good a plan as any. But first I'll need to hire some mercs of my own. I'm good, but even I know my limits." 

"Send the coordinates to Joker," Jane said, pointing a thumb vaguely in the direction of the cockpit, "and we'll see if we can't hit a few if we're in the area." 

Wrex's eyes narrowed. "What, you going merc on the side now?" 

Jane grinned. "I kinda already have, but this would be at no cost to you, especially since I can't exactly afford to pay you what your worth." 

"Why would you care about me getting my damn armor back?" Wrex's gaze was suspicious, and one of his massive hands had clenched into a fist. 

Jane chewed the inside of her lip, searched for words. "The region of Earth that I grew up in," she started, "people say a lot of shit about it. That we're stupid. Violent. Hateful. That we can't do great science or make great art because we're too busy fighting with each other over piles of shit. That we shouldn't be allowed to breed." Her eyes came up to meet the krogan's. "It's no genophage, but I guess I know something about people shitting on you before you even get a chance to open your mouth." 

  


* * *

  


The xeno-friendly bar Jane had found in New Cousteau was cramped and loud, which she only appreciated because it suited her current purpose. Vakarian, wearing an odd sleeveless tunic that he claimed showed off his best assets, had come in about ten minutes before her, and from her table in a sparely lit corner, she could just see him at the bar, already chatting up a _torin_. Meanwhile, she waited for her contact. The Specialist, as he or she had taken to signing their messages, hadn't specified who or what would be meeting her, only that they would recognize the illustrious Commander Shepard. So, Jane ordered a whiskey and waited. 

It was a dark-colored salarian that slid into the booth next to her and gave the code phrase. "Sorry I'm late," he muttered with a fidget of his head. "I thought one of your Loch Ness monsters was going to eat me off the docks." 

"It has been quite a downpour," Jane answered nonchalantly, leaning back to get a look at the newcomer. He was young, probably barely a teen, but his eyes were quick as they darted around the bar. "So," she continued, "what's this mutually beneficial arrangement the Specialist think would strike my fancy?" 

"I'm here to give you some intel, gratis, as proof that the Specialist has the kind of information you may need," the salarian explained. 

Jane's eyebrows lifted slowly. "Gratis?" 

The salarian nodded, a quick jerk of his head. "The Specialist is interested in establishing a long-term relationship with you, and, as such, is willing to extend, ah, _gifts_ of goodwill." 

Jane shrugged, took a drink. "Alright." She waved a hand. "Let's see what the Specialist has to offer." 

The contact nodded, leaned forward until his elbows rested on the table. "Reports suggest that geth have started to amass in the Armstrong Cluster--" 

"Old news," Jane interrupted, looking away pointedly. 

The salarian swallowed, apparently disconcerted by this turn of events. "And, ah, I suppose you've already heard about the STG unit on Virmire." 

"Yes," Jane said. Her face was schooled into a bored expression, but inwardly she was groaning. This was starting to look like a waste of time. 

"I see," he replied. "Well, we understand that you've recently expressed an interested in acquiring more information regarding the ExoGeni corporation's activities in the Verge. While a more detailed accounting will cost you, I can tell you that one of ExoGeni's shipments ended up at a Cerberus facility." 

Jane made an effort to turn her head slowly, trying to hide her sudden excitement. "Now that," she drawled slowly, "is an interesting piece of information, and I would pay to know more. But, given that we looking to establish a long-term relationship here, I'd like to know a little bit more about who I'm working with." 

To his credit, the young salarian hid his grin of victory quickly, but not before Jane spied it. She wondered if all the Specialist's people were so young, so new at the information game. Maybe the Specialist was new to it themselves. Jane's extranet searches had turned up nothing of interest, nothing to suggest that this was anything more than another run-of-the-mill broker, a minor player at best. "The Specialist was once part of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance," the salarian explained, then quickly hurried on when Jane gave him an incredulous look. "They served as an intelligence specialist, not a field operative, and retired some time ago. However, they have taken the news that Saren has gone rogue very hard and, since you are the one tracking him down, wish to offer you assistance." He smiled more slyly this time. "At a reasonable price, of course." 

Jane swirled the liquor in her glass, thinking this over. It was possible this was a pawn of the Council, here to spread more… more what exactly? Misinformation? She didn't think they were doing that. Misdirection? That seemed more likely, though their motives to do so were unclear. Or maybe she could take this at face value -- an information broker looking to make money while also nursing a personal vendetta. 

Well, there was really only one way to find out: throw some money at the problem and see what came back. 

"Alright," she said finally, with a tight smile, "let's see what we can do about getting this partnership started. I'll take whatever you have about ExoGeni shipments originating from or arriving at Feros and whatever you have connecting ExoGeni to Cerberus. I'd also like to know about the financial backers of Binary Helix's operations on Peak 15. I don't want to know what happened," she said, holding up a hand, "I want to know who made it happen, got it?" 

The salarian nodded, scanned the club. Maybe he wasn't so green. "It'll be 5000 credits for the first, available immediately. The second will take a few days and will be another 7500, half upfront, half upon delivery." 

Jane smiled a little more. "Very reasonable prices, indeed." She opened her omnitool, transferred the payment to him from her private account -- no sense in alerting either the Alliance or the Council that she was using discretionary funds on this -- then waited for the ping as he sent her the intel on ExoGeni. The salarian inclined his head graciously as he stood, saying, "It's been a pleasure to meet you, Commander Shepard. You'll hear from us in a few days." 

Jane nodded in return, then downed the rest of her drink and pulling up the menu to order another one, signalling to Vakarian that the meeting had gone fine and that they could both focus on enjoying the few hours of shore leave ahead of them. 

  


* * *

  


Garrus watched a second drink being delivered to Shepard's table and gratefully turned his full attention to the very handsome _torin_ at his side. "So," he drawled, leaning in maybe a little closer than was necessary to be heard, "what's a turian do on a world full of humans?" 

Hyron's mandibles fluttered charmingly. "Mostly wait around in bars for other turians to stop by," he said, angling his head receptively toward Garrus's. The _torin_ was a deep brown all over, plate and hide alike, with a spiraling pattern of white over his face and fringe. His neck… well, Garrus visualized running his tongue all over it every time his eyes drifted down. He'd made a point of not even thinking about eyeing the Hyron's waist until Shepard gave the all-clear. 

That little voice in the back of his mind that so often sounded like his father snorted a little at his desperation, but the rest of him didn't care. Garrus hadn't gone this long without sex in a very long time, and he was not going to judge his body's reactions now. "Well I guess tonight's your lucky night," he said, jutting one hip out a little and letting lust coat every word. 

Hyron decided to play coy, looking down at the bar and fiddling with his drink. "I dunno," he said, "I could always indulge my second favorite hobby." 

"And that is?" 

"Music." The _torin_ looked at him from the corner of his eye. "I play _stabata_ , and I've found that I quite enjoy this human musical style called jazz. There's a little club where some people gather a few nights a week and play together." 

Garrus's mandibles flicked. "They just all play at the same time? Without practicing before?" 

Hyron shifted to jut out a hip of his own, pulling back an arm to make sure Garrus didn't miss the movement. Garrus let his eyes drift down, down, down, felt his plates shift, and quickly jerked his eyes back up. Hyron was smirking. "They improvise together. Someone starts the song, sets the chord and pattern, and then people take turns improvising while the rest keep the foundation going. Everyone gets a chance to put their own styling on what we're all playing together." 

"That sounds… really interesting," Garrus said, completely genuine. "I wish we'd be here longer; I'd love to come see it. Or, hear it, I guess." 

That was apparently the right thing to say; Hyron reached over stroke a hand along Garrus's upper arm, smiling. "It's too bad," he said. "I'd like for you to hear it too." 

Less than a half an hour later, Garrus had Hyron's back against a wall in the alley outside the bar, biting gently at that delicious neck. He knew he should be embarrassed by how eager he was, but Hyron seemed just as, well, needy, and the _torin_ 's low stuttery growl was driving him crazy. His plates were creeping open and Garrus seriously hoped that any second Hyron would invite back home, not because he was above a quick fuck in an alley -- not right now anyway -- but because Hyron deserved better than that. 

The long, deep moan that was growing in his chest was interrupted by a very familiar voice behind him. "Hey Garrus," Shepard called, "you got three hours." 

Garrus peered over his shoulder, mandibles pulling up tight, but Shepard was already walking back toward the dock. "You could join us," Hyron purred in return, and the sound went straight to the depths of Garrus's belly, despite his sudden nerves. 

Shepard turned but kept stepping backwards. "I appreciate the offer, but no thanks. Y'all have fun." Then she was gone. 

Hyron finally noticed Garrus's discomfort. "What's wrong?" he asked, his own mandibles drawing up. 

"That's my CO," Garrus said lightly, but his subvocal were still showing his embarrassment. 

"Oh shit," Hyron replied. "I thought she was your mate." Garrus gave the other turian a very puzzled expression, and Hyron's mandibles fluttered in a sheepish apology. "Come back to my place and I'll make it up to you?" 

Garrus grinned in return, face relaxing. "I think we can work something out." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME ON TETHER THREAD: Shepard subjects everyone to 80s music, and Garrus threatens to tranq his CO...


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GLOSSARY
> 
> Torin: Male turian of the age of majority (MizDirected)  
> !!! Last call on this one, folks. By now, you either know it or you don’t.
> 
> Netichik: Insect analogues native to Palaven that have been exported to many colony worlds (MizDirected)

Garrus ran a couple final checks over the Mako's exterior and wondered idly what kind of damage she'd come back with this time. Wrex was waiting by the back hatch with a bored expression, but Tali was fairly buzzing with impatience beside him. "C'mon, Garrus," she whined, "don't you have this piece of junk ready to go yet?" 

Garrus's brow plates shifted as he said, "It's not me. We're waiting for the commander." 

Tali made a noise of frustration, then bit it off quickly as the elevator door slip open and Shepard stepped out. "Tali," she said without preamble, "you're benched." 

Garrus turned in surprise to see Tali's shoulders slump. "But Shepard…" she started. 

"No buts," the commander cut her off. "You're running a fever and need to be in med bay. If you get up there now, you might be able to hit the third or fourth base." 

Tali looked for a moment like she was going to fight, then stomped off to the elevator without another word. Garrus knew how upset she would be, but Shepard was right: a fever could turn fatal all too quickly in a quarian. 

Shepard ordered Williams to suit up, and Garrus went back to his inspection. "Worried I'm going to break her this time?" Shepard asked, suddenly beside him. He started slightly, then said, drily, "Of course not, Commander." 

Shepard grinned. "Good answer. You're driving today." 

He blinked at her. "Really?" 

"Sure thing." 

Garrus's mandibles twitched uncertainly. "Are you okay?" Then his brow plates lowered. "Is this a trick?" 

"Yes and no, respectively," the commander replied. "I just want to be free to, ya know, look at things." 

Garrus dipped his head to the side, still feeling suspicious. "Whatever you say, Commander," he said, flattening his subvocals before remembering she couldn't hear them anyway. 

Shepard seemed satisfied by his answer, moving away. "Alright, you sorry ignorant pyjaks," she called as Williams finished assembling her gear. "Today, you are getting a much needed lesson in human culture, specifically the music of the 1980s." Garrus looked to Williams, who trotted over while still buckling clasps on her armor, but he thought she looked as confused as he felt. He turned to Wrex, who just shrugged at the _torin_ 's questioning glance. Shepard ignored them all entirely. "Additionally," she continued, "we'll be taking out the geth outpost on the surface, or at the very least, getting enough intel to take it out later. Vakarian's taking the wheel. Wrex, you're on cannon. Williams, main turret. Any questions?" No one said anything, and Shepard grinned widely. "Then let's load up." 

Garrus headed in the hatch first to take his place in the driver's seat, starting the pre-drop checklist as soon as he sat down. He heard Wrex and Williams settle in behind him, then, rather than taking a seat on the troop benches in the very back where passengers usually rode, Shepard wedged herself between Garrus and the wall, bracing tightly where she could see everything he could and fiddle with the controls. He looked up at her. "You sure you don't want to drive, Commander?" he asked, trying to flatten the annoyance out of his subvocals. 

"Very content right here, Vakarian," she answered, pulling on her helmet and keying their channel open so Joker could hear her orders. "Got us a drop zone, Joker?" 

"Lots of wide open space on this rock, Commander," Joker answered as Garrus pulled on his own helmet. "We're green across the board here," the _torin_ said to both the commander and the pilot. 

"Drop us whenever you're ready, Joker," Shepard said, manipulating her omnitool until a terrible noise emanated from the Mako's speakers, some kind of beat with high-pitched pinging sounds over it. "We'll start with a classic," Shepard was saying through their comms, "Take On Me by A-ha." 

The drop was smooth enough, even with the racket; Shepard barely bumped Garrus's shoulder despite her precarious position. Garrus thought Shepard might lay off the music once they were on the ground, but it just kept coming as she directed Garrus toward an odd reading on the map. "It might be a treasure," she announced, "just like this song, which is about a flying toy almost causing a huge war." 

Garrus huffed in response. "Seriously, Shepard," he said, "are you deliberately being incomprehensible to non-humans?" 

"Incomprehensible to humans too," Williams chimed in. "Everything she talks about is at least 200 years old. This music? People don't listen to this." 

"When you grow up dirt poor on Earth like I did," Shepard explained, peering out the Mako's front view for her treasure, "the only entertainment you get is the 200 year old stuff that's free on the extranet. Stop here, Vakarian." 

The downed probe they had found had some useful tech that Shepard stashed in the back before they moved on, but they didn't get far from the crash site before they met some geth sentries. Garrus maneuvered the Mako into some half-cover while Williams and Wrex whittled away at the machines. Shepard, oddly enough, started singing. " _I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints,_ " she belted in a tone that wasn't unpleasant. " _The sinners are much more fun… And only the good die young!_ " 

Wrex rumbled in amusement as he finished off the last geth trooper outside. "I like this song," he said. 

"You would," Shepard quipped. "It's about seducing virgins." 

Wrex laughed again, and Garrus had to admit, the tune was pretty catchy. 

"Alright," the commander continued, "let's take out that base." 

Garrus drove the Mako around to the hills that shielded the south side of the base, then began a careful ascent. A new song came on, one with a driving rhythm and dramatic female vocals. "This song is for you, Vakarian," Shepard said from over his shoulder, keeping an eye on the ladar map the _Normandy_ beamed down to them. 

"Oh," he said offhandedly, focused on getting the rover up the hill without damaging the suspension too much. "Why's that?" 

"Just is." 

The music only added to the tension as Garrus eased up the embankment until they could just get eyes on the geth squadron. All four of them studied the scene before them: a ring of sentry towers circled four of the largest walking tanks Garrus had seen. In the center of these defenses the geth had build a comm tower, but the signals coming from it were too heavily encrypted for Garrus to make much sense of them at the moment. "Orders, Commander?" he asked. 

"Just hold position, Vakarian." As she studied the map in on the console, Shepard began to sing again, this time in a low, distracted way, and Garrus remembered that this was, supposedly, his song. " _I need a hero!_ " the female singer roared. " _I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night. He's gotta be strong and he's gotta be fast and he's gotta be fresh from the fight._ " Garrus didn't know if he should he flattered or not; it mostly depended on whether Shepard was teasing. But the song was infectious, and he wondered if there were any good dance remixes. 

"Okay," Shepard said, breaking into his thoughts. "Y'all are going to focus on the tanks. Take it slow and easy, move around if you need to. I'm going to work on the snipers and rocket troopers in the towers. Hopefully if you guys are making enough noise they won't realize I'm out there for a while." 

Garrus's jaw clenched tight. Was this why she'd put him in the driver's seat? So that she could go off and play sniper? A little voice in the back of his mind told him that she wouldn't be playing at sniper -- she was almost as good a shot as he was -- and that she hadn't known that a sniper would be useful in this situation anyway. Still, he got the weird feeling that she wanted to put him in his place, remind him that she was the commander here, not that he needed the reminder. Hell, he wasn't questioning her orders now, was he? 

Garrus reflected once again that he was not a very good turian. 

Despite his inner vitriol, Garrus said nothing when Shepard asked if there were any questions. "Right then," she said, marching to the Mako's back hatch. "Vakarian is in charge until I get back." 

Garrus blinked in surprise. Was she planning on cutting off her comms? Apparently not, since he could still hear her humming as he eased the Mako a little closer and ordered Wrex and Williams to focus fire on the nearest target. The hero song finished as they took down one of the tanks then retreated behind an outcropping of rocks to let the shields recover. Garrus watched the signatures on the ladar; one of the towers was now vacant due to Shepard's sharpshooting. The _torin_ suspected she was on the move, since her voice sounded a little breathy as she sang along to the new tune. "Alright, Vakarian," she said suddenly, "let me know when you're ready to move again." 

"Wrex," he said, "take the next closest tank. Williams, scatter a few shots in the towers before hitting the tanks, try to keep them from identifying another shooter, then open up on Wrex's target. Shepard, we're moving." 

There was something about the raucous music that made Garrus's every action seem that much more confident. Shepard seemed to feel the same thing; the sound of her Mantis firing happened in time with the beat as she sang under her breath: " _You_ " -- BANG -- " _shook me all night long._ " Then she said, "Two towers down. The one closest to you is still manned; it's gonna be a hike before I get a good shot." 

Garrus and the Mako team had the tanks down and were in cover before Shepard had cleared the other tower. "All clear, Mako," she reported. "Meet me by the comm array." 

Garrus pulled the Mako into the valley, then exited the rover, the others close behind. "You two keep watch," he directed as he strode to the closest terminal. He was well into hacking the comm system when Shepard had scrambled her way down, coming up beside him. "Any luck?" she asked. 

"Not yet, but it's only a matter of time." 

She grunted in acknowledgement, then found a terminal of her own. Between the two of them, they managed to download a few terabytes of data before the system's self-destruct sequence kicked in, frying all the circuits. "Alright," Shepard said. "Good work, folks. Let's get back on our boat." 

She even had a few songs picked out for the return trip. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Jane had spent the last couple of hours going over Saren's report logs for the second time, and this time she thought she might have found a pattern. She wished she could put another set of eyes on the data, confirm that she wasn't just imagining things, but the Council had been very detailed in their lecture on security clearance levels and how no one else on her ship was allowed to see the contents of these files. It wasn't so much that she was worried that her crew might leak something, but she did have a responsibility to the rest of the human race to not fuck this up. 

Jane sat up straight, stretching her back and rocking her neck from side to side. The hit against the geth had gone as smoothly as it could, though she had a feeling that she had somehow managed to piss Garrus off again. Maybe the music had been a bad idea, but she had stayed up so late going over Saren's files that she needed something to help her stay focused on the present. And she's meant what she'd said about "Holding Out for a Hero" being his song; it seemed to have the right balance of over-the-top ego and campy deprecation to suit him. But maybe he'd thought she was making fun of him. Or maybe he thought she'd wanted to stand over his shoulder and make sure he did the job right in the Mako. 

She sighed heavily. She hadn't meant to cast doubt on his competence. If anything, she was depending on that competence to buoy her up through the mission. Dealing with the geth incursion was important, but Jane had this lurking feeling that there was something else just waiting for them to slip up, and she didn't want to send a team out without her just in case that big bad came to call when she least expected it. The last thing she needed was this kind of misunderstanding with her second when she was hoping to turn to him more often for mission execution. Maybe they just needed to hash it out -- she needed to talk to him about what she'd found in Saren's reports anyway. She glanced at her chronometer; they were well into the night cycle with another Mako drop scheduled in ten hours. Still, Garrus might be awake. She opened a little chat window. 

  


_CHAT.live//CONNECT:61548937280_to_01208594587_

_Connecting…_

_Connected._

_JS: Are you still up?_

_GV: Yeah. You need something?_

_JS: Wanted to go over some intel with you, if you're up to it._

_GV: Be up in a minute._

_GV: You want anything from the mess? Don't humans heat up liquid animal proteins to drink before bed?_

_JS: Warm milk? Some humans drink that. This one certainly does not. But a mug of hot water would be appreciated._

  


Garrus was coming through the door a minute later with one mug of hot water and one mug of that smelled like he had just boiled some leaves he found. _Guess that's really all tea is,_ Jane thought as she plopped a small bag of her favorite herbal blend into the cup Garrus handed her. The _torin_ sat at her little table, settling his elbows on the surface and studying her with those sharp eyes of his. "So what's up, Shepard?" he asked. 

Jane used the tea as a distraction as she gathered her thoughts. "First off," she finally said, "I want to clear up any misconceptions about my actions during our mission today. I…" Jane struggled to find words, then gave up. "Look, I don't want to be your CO, standing over your shoulder and making sure you do your job. I mean, yeah, I'm giving the orders, because somebody has to, but I want everyone to get used to taking orders from you too, as my second. You seem to chafe under stupid leadership anyway, so maybe we can agree to being secret partners while continuing this facade that you're my subordinate in public." She tried to read his features, but the best she could do was decide that he wasn't angry or amused. At least not in any extreme. 

Garrus's nostrils flared as he sighed. "I have no problem taking orders from you, Shepard," he said without any hint of reservation. "But I still don't always know how to read you, and I think sometimes I see mixed signals where there are none intended." He tilted his head to the side in a turian shrug. "Maybe you could talk me through what was going on today?" 

Jane barked a laugh. "Yeah, that's fair. I didn't sleep much and subjected everyone to loud music to keep myself awake and focused. I had you drive the Mako because I didn't think I was up to it, and I stood over your shoulder because if I sat in the back, I'd end up brooding over these files I was up all night reading instead of actually paying attention. In short, you were the crutch I used to hide my own weakness." She frowned and took a sip of tea, scalding the roof of her mouth. When she said it all like that, it made her sound downright incompetent. 

But Garrus just nodded, like it wasn't at all odd. "You know, Commander," he said with a slight frown, "if you want to ward off mental and psychological attacks, sleep deprivation does not make a strong defense." 

Jane wasn't sure how to respond to his concern, so she went for a joke. "You get a lot of psychological attacks at C-Sec?" she asked with a grin. 

The _torin_ kept his serious expression, but he did settle his body back into a more relaxed posture. "Not C-Sec, no. Are you familiar with the _hastitim_?" 

Jane felt herself blanche a little. "Was that what you meant by military police?" 

Garrus played with his mug. "No, I was an MP after _hastitim._ Most of us either end up as MPs or Black Watch." He grimaced slightly, mandibles pulling up and nostrils shifting. "But I guess that means you know what I'm talking about." 

"Stopping secessionist forces," Jane answered simply. 

"Yes," the _torin_ replied, "and sometimes what you humans call wetwork." 

"Yeah, wetwork." 

"Anyway," Garrus said, glossing over their shared dark tone, "part of our training was to recognize signs of psychological strain in ourselves and our squadmates because in the field we were often subjected to the same environmental factors the secessionists used to recruit and maintain support from the local populace: propaganda messages, living conditions, terrorist tactics and so on. If somebody was about to break, we needed to know. And sleep deprivation is one of the quickest ways to break a person, Shepard, across races." His eyes were boring into her at this point. "If you want to have any hope of resisting indoctrination, you've gotta sleep regularly. I know you've got a lot on your mind, but you have to sleep." 

"Yeah, well…" Jane trailed off. She wanted some kind of comeback, but everything he was saying was annoyingly reasonable. She sighed. "You're right." 

Garrus's mandibles relaxed, like he'd been expecting a harsh response. "So next time you can't sleep, you'll let me know?" 

Jane raised an eyebrow. "Can't sleep and won't sleep are two different things. Last night I had too much work." 

Garrus chuffed. "Fine. But keep in mind, when you're in _hastitim_ , you have a responsibility to the rest of your squad to do whatever you can to make sure your CO's head stays on straight. I'm not above tranquilizing you if I think you're starting to put yourself and, by extension, the crew in danger." 

"Yes, I'm quite familiar with all the things good turians are ready to do to keep their COs functioning well," Jane said drily. Of all the turian sexual practices she'd had to get used to on the _Careo_ , that had been the hardest one to swallow. Rationally she understood, but old Alliance habits died hard. 

Garrus let the comment go with a way flick of a mandible. "So what was it you needed to go over with me?" 

"The Council sent me Saren's reports," Jane answered. "I spent last night going over them, and I read through them a second time once we got back." 

"Anything useful?" 

"Maybe. I can't show the files to anyone else -- Sparatus would love to charge me with treason -- but if there's any kind of pattern, it's that Saren got less... less casual in his violence. Fewer civilian casualties." Jane sipped her tea. "I think everyone thought he was starting to mellow out with age, but I'm wondering if the indoctrination was encouraging him to keep a lower profile, call less attention to himself." 

Garrus nodded. "That would make sense. Wouldn't want anyone suddenly questioning his mental state." 

"Yeah, so I guess if I start acting... less weird?" Jane trailed off. "I don't even know what to say here, honestly." 

"Less weird works," Garrus replied. "I'll add 'playing obnoxious music' to the list of things that indicate Shepard is still Shepard." 

She glared at him. "My music is _not_ obnoxious." 

His mandibles flapped in silent laughter. "Whatever, commander. Now are you going to finish your tea and go to sleep, or are you going to lay awake obsessing until it's time for us to head out again and then subject us all to horrible noise again?" 

"Are you making fun of my heritage, Vakarian?" Jane said with a scowl. "Because you don't see me shitting on, I dunno, _Fleet and Flotilla_." 

"Whoa whoa whoa," Garrus snapped back, raising his hands in alarm. "That's a line you do not cross, Shepard. I don't care how much herbal tea you've had." He struggled to keep his mandibles from twitching. " _Fleet and Flotilla_ is sacred." He stood abruptly, pointing a talon at her mug. "Finish your tea and get in bed, and I'll let you tell me more about this ridiculous Manbat or whatever." 

Jane felt her face getting hot. "Hey, I didn't say I needed anything from you," she snapped. 

"No," Garrus acknowledged, planting his feet, "you deflected with an attempt at humor, which means that you're not sure I'll buy your attempt at lying, which means you are going to obsess instead of sleeping." 

"Last I check, I'm the commander around here," Jane grumbled, making a show of taking a long draught of tea. 

Garrus just watched with a level stare. "Tranquilizer darts, Shepard," he said. "Or, perhaps I'll just slip a little _netichik_ in Alenko's ear that his captain would welcome a -- what is it you humans call it? -- a quickie?" 

She couldn't see herself, but Jane was sure she was white as a sheet. "Garrus," she said, suddenly hoarse. "Garrus, don't say anything like that. I'm not fucking around." 

The little glint of teeth she saw wasn't kind. "Neither am I, _Jane_ ," he replied. 

And that was how Jane ended up lying in her bed with Garrus sitting at her side, kneading the broad pads of his fingers into her palm again. "So, last time you mentioned something about someone named Jason?" he said. "I was promised a very sad ending." 

Jane huffed, irritation and relief warring at the base of her skull. "One night," she started, "the Batman went out to patrol the city and he left his car parked in an alley. So back then, human cars didn't float; they had wheels, and those wheels could come off if they needed maintenance or had to be replaced or whatever." 

"Were they still around when you were a kid?" Garrus asked, lightly. "Because I bet you ran the wheels right off a few." 

Jane snorted, but opted to ignore his comment. "So while Batman was away, this kid found his car -- and Batman had a really recognizable car -- and decided that he could steal Batman's wheel and sell them for a lot of money. See Jason -- that's the kid -- he was an orphan and homeless and he really needed the money, even if it meant getting on Batman's bad side." Her body sank a little deeper into the mattress. "Jason had gotten three of the wheels off and was working on the fourth when Batman came back and caught him." 

"Uh oh," Garrus rumbled above her, "what happened then." 

With a deep satisfied sigh, Jane said, "Batman took him home…" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things...
> 
> First of all, I figured out how to make it work that Shepard is constantly referencing shit that’s centuries old. Public domain for the win! (For more reasons than just this.) Also, I think we can all agree that Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” is really, truly Garrus’s song.
> 
> Secondly, Batfans: I know that Dick Grayson was Robin before Jason Todd, but you know how in mythology all these things are happening and we can’t really tell what order they happened in, or some stories seem to put events in one order, and some stories in another, and sometimes characters get written out entirely, or magically “fixed” or... wait, that’s comics. Anyway, this is the myth of Batman after a few hundred years; it’s all even more jumbled and piecemeal than it already is now. Plus, Jason would be the Robin that Shepard (as I’ve written her) would identify with the most. 
> 
> NEXT TIME on TETHER THREAD...  
> Dr. Saleon. It’s time.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... this chapter kinda grew on me. Like, by a good thousand words. But I'm happy with where it went? Like, not *happy* happy, but satisfied as a writer... you'll see what I mean.
> 
> Also! Also! Little Ocelost made her first turian curse word! Thinking about expletives is one of my favorite pastimes, so I am especially pleased with myself on this one.
> 
> GLOSSARY  
> Tarc: vulgar expletive equivalent to shit (MizDirected)
> 
> Siligur: a grain grown and harvested on many dextro worlds. It has a high protein count and is used as a primary ingredient in dextro meal bars. Ground more finely, it is used as baking flour. (MizDirected)
> 
> Soluvermos: a small (average size 8-12 cms/1-2 cms diameter), heavily armoured earthworm native to Palaven's most northern and southern regions. It is considered a delicacy (MizDirected). The term may also carry a sexual connotation, used to refer someone particularly attractive or a turian phallus (author).
> 
> Patrem: formal term for father (MizDirected)
> 
> Polished some gizzard: paid out bribes; turian equivalent of 'greasing some palms' (canon) --> No joke. I've been replaying ME1 for inspiration, and Lilli on Noveria uses this phrase, which tickled me to death.
> 
> Verberatum: While the term would literally translate for humans as "rape," "verberatum" is considered an especially vulgar curse. In such a sexually permissive culture, turians have developed almost no expletives based on sex (and find humans' extravagant use of the word "fuck" somewhat troubling), but sexual violence is viewed as a particularly disgusting practice. Legally, such cases are treated as especially heinous physical assaults, but do not have special nomenclature. Informally, however, the terms "verberatum" and "verberator" are used to describe forced sexual contact and those who perpetrate it. (author)
> 
> Buratrum: turian equivalent of hell; the place where the spirits of those who died cowardly and ignoble deaths reside (MizDirected)

They took out the second geth installation as easy as the first, and by the time they were ready to hit the third, Chakwas declared Tali fit for field duty. Shepard gave the quarian a once-over, then sent her off with Garrus, Alenko, and Williams to take out the next outpost. Garrus lifted a brow plate in her direction, but she gave him only a level look and told the rest of the team he was in charge before sauntering off toward the elevator. Williams had given him a dirty look, but Alenko at least seemed only too happy to oblige and Tali was too excited about getting her hands on some new data to care who was in charge. 

It soon became clear, as they approached a collection of geth sentry towers, that Shepard hadn't left them completely. "Don't stray too far on foot," she warned over their comms, apparently tapped into someone's hard suit camera. "No way it's just these guys out here."

"We circled the whole hill," Garrus answered, lining up a careful shot and watching a flashlight head explode before its owner could get their next rocket launched. "There's nothing else up here."

"Bad feeling in my bones, Vakarian," Shepard said. "Keep close to the Mako."

When the Colossus fell from nowhere, shaking the ground beneath their feet, Garrus swore to himself that he'd never doubt Shepard's bones again.

Once the Mako was back on the _Normandy_ , Joker came over his comms. "Commander wants to see you," he said. "I think she's in her bunk."

Garrus had been around humans long enough to hear the leer in Joker's tone. "Get your mind out of the gutter, Joker," he warned.

"What?" Joker returned, managing to sound both incredulous and mocking.

The door to the captain's quarters opened readily to Garrus's query, but he pulled up short when he caught stepped inside and discovered Shepard was taking a vid call with a pretty _tarin_. "--sounds kind of insane to me," she was saying, "but it didn't seem like the human was selling me _tarc_ for _siligur_ , so…"

The corners of Jane's mouth tipped down in a slight frown, but Garrus recognized it as a look of thoughtfulness rather than displeasure. She glanced over her shoulder at him, then gestured him toward a chair. Garrus made his way there as unobtrusively as possible, but it was all in vain; the _tarin_ let out a low trill of excitement and said, "Well hello, tall and handsome!"

"Uh, hello," Garrus returned as he moved further out of the range of Shepard's 'tool.

"C'mon, Janey," the _tarin_ crooned. "Aren't you going to be polite and introduce us?"

Jane sighed. "Rhee, this is Garrus Vakarian. Vakarian, this is Rhianon Alvados. Happy now?"

"Vakarian, huh?" Alvados's mandibles brushed her jaw in gesture of snarky humor. "You didn't mention the turian on your crew was Palavenian."

"You know I don't know these things, Rhee," Shepard countered. "How much are these guys asking again?"

"The estimate was 85,000 creds," the _tarin_ said, but she was clearly still searching for Garrus. "So, Vakarian, how do you like working under Shepard?" Her subvocals made the sexual innuendo painfully clear.

Garrus decided to play along. "I've always enjoyed working under females," he said flatly while his subvocals purred lewdly. “Especially the ones who can appreciate my unique skill set.”

Shepard was not amused. "Just because I can't hear you doesn't mean I don't know what's going on." She leveled a glare at the holo display. "Stop corrupting my second, Rhee."

"Tasty _soluvermos_ like him?" Alavados replied. "He's been corrupted quite enough, I believe."

"He's also been entire polite and considerate of his non-turian crewmates, unlike some turians I know," Shepard shot back. "Back to the _Daredevil_. I'm familiar enough with the tech they're describing to think it might work. Tell them we'll pay the 85,000 _if_ they get us the footage within 60 hours. The payment drops by 1,000 creds for every hour after."

"That a hard line with you?" the _tarin_ asked. "Or can I negotiate?"

Shepard scratched the side of her neck idly in a way that a turian never would in polite company. "Give them up to 80 hours if they seriously push back, but tell them that after 120 we won't buy anything. No way I'm forking over that much money for data after I need it."

Alvados's mandibles pulled up tight. "You wanna tell me what's so important about a backass colony world?"

"You know I can't," Shepard answered. "But you might tell Hestra to keep to the Citadel side of the Terminus for a bit."

Alvados's subvocals gave a sharp affirmative as she nodded her head in a very human gesture. "I'll be back in touch after I talk to the humans again."

"Thanks, Rhee. I'll owe you a nice fee for all this."

The holo display from Shepard's tool disappeared as the captain heaved a sigh, then turned to face Garrus. "Sorry about that," she said. "Rhee has no filter."

Garrus dipped his head in acceptance of the apology. "One of your mercenary friends?" he clarified.

"Yeah, she's been handling some contracts for me."

"Still worried about your information channels getting tainted?" Garrus asked.

Shepard hummed in acknowledgement as she gave him a once over. "Everyone came back in one piece, I take it?" 

"Alenko sprained an ankle, and Tali's getting her usual post-op check-up, but other than that, we came out fine."

"They give you any problems?"

"The geth? Not particularly…"

"I meant Alenko and Williams."

Garrus sat back in the chair, eyeing Shepard skeptically. "Alenko was fine, though I'm not familiar enough with his biotics to be comfortable giving him more than the most cursory instructions in the field. Williams gave me a little growling—"

Shepard's brow hairs shot up. "She _growled_ at you?"

His mandibles twitched. "Turian phrase," he explained. "A low-level droning of subvocals that express resentment. She made a few dismissive comments, but when the shooting started, she was all business."

"Ah." Shepard snorted. "I guess humans would say she gave you some lip, but that is not a phrase that turians would use, is it?" She snorted again, almost thoughtful. "Well then, I'll take the next geth outpost, then you'll take the one after that. Hopefully by then, these humans Rhee has found will have something for me to look at regarding Virmire. Sound good?"

"Whatever you say, Shepard."

She looked up at him, eyes narrowing. "Is that an affirmative 'whatever you say, Shepard' or a skeptical 'whatever you say, Shepard'?" she asked.

Garrus's mandibles fluttered slightly. "An affirmative," he said, subvocals sounding the steady hum of loyalty. "Anything else?" 

She waved a hand vaguely. "That's it."

Garrus decided to push his luck. "Any chance I can get that _tarin_ 's net ID?" he asked, smoothing down his mandibles with a real effort.

"Oh hell no," Shepard snapped.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The fourth geth outpost went down easy, and Jane took the elevator up to the main deck with Tali just to make sure the quarian went in for her post-mission check-up like a good girl. Alenko was in the mess hall, sinking a cup of tea and perusing a datapad. "Any trouble, captain?" he asked as Jane sat down across from him after giving Tali a little push toward the medbay.

"Wrex took a few hard hits," she answered, wrestling off her gloves and dropping them on the table, "but he'll be fine."

Alenko scoffed. "Krogan," he said under his breath. "I can't even imagine what they were like before the genophage."

Jane grimaced. "I know." She rubbed the back of her neck ruefully, unable to shake the sense that the genophage was _wrong_ even if it was holding the galaxy together for the time being. Still, she decided, one problem at at time, and the problem in front of her was her LT. "I wanted to make sure that you know that putting Vakarian in charge the other day wasn't a statement about your competence or lack thereof," she said in a low tone.

Alenko waved off her concern quickly. "Honestly," he said, "it's a bit of a relief. Vakarian's got more experience than me when it comes to mixed-species squads, and probably more experience in a lot of areas. Not that I'm not willing to step up if you need me…" he amended quickly.

"And that's what makes you a good LT, Alenko," Jane said with feeling, "but I need to give you some explanation so that when you've got your fellow Alliance personnel breathing down your neck for answers you've got something to tell them. And that something is this: If something happens to me, all y'all Alliance folks will be headed back to Anderson, and we can't be sure what Anderson's orders will be at that point. Vakarian, on the other hand, will have more leeway to continue the investigation." She shrugged heavily, suddenly feeling tired of all the planning and second-guessing she'd been doing lately. "Basically, you're second to the Alliance crew, but Vakarian is second on the mission," she summed up.

"Roger, captain," Alenko replied, taking in her words with a serious look.

Jane sent Alenko with Vakarian to take out the last outpost with no qualms. She was surprised, then, when the _torin_ that came to her to debrief was so visibly agitated, mandibles pulled up tight and brow plates narrowed. "What's wrong?" She asked immediately. "Is Tali alright?"

"Tali's fine, Shepard," Vakarian reassured, though he didn't look reassured himself. "The mission went fine."

Jane waited a moment to see if the _torin_ would continue, but he just fiddled with increasing ferocity with a clasp on his gauntlet. "You got something stuck in your craw, Vakarian?" She asked finally.

He gave her a puzzled look that at the very least stopped his incessantly snapping of the clasp. "My gizzard's fine."

She rolled her eyes. "Well _something's_ not fine, so why don't you just spit it out already."

"It's an old C-Sec case," he announced in a rush, sitting down opposite of her. "I've got a new lead."

Jane settled herself into her chair, intensely curious as to what the normally unflappable _torin_ so shaken up. "Alright," she said, "let's hear it."

"About a year ago, I got assigned to tracking black market trade on the Citadel," Vakarian started, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "I'd pissed off the Executor, gotten shit-shoveling duty again. Most of the black market stuff is harmless — you'd have to be crazy to try sapient-trafficking through the Citadel, so there wasn't much I needed to pursue. But during the course of the investigation, I noticed an increase in the trade of body parts. Organs, mostly." He dipped his head to the side. "We usually get a few of those, but not in the numbers I was seeing. We weren't sure if there was a new black market lab or if some freak was harvesting organs from citizens."

Jane snorted. She'd seen something of the organ market during her time in the Terminus. "Even on the Citadel, huh?"

"Yeah," Vakarian agreed. "Every so often, some lab sells unwanted parts through the black market, but they're not as bad as the psychos. We didn't know if we should be relieved or more worried when a DNA sample led us to a turian who was still alive and very convinced he'd never lost his liver. After a bit of digging, I discovered this _torin_ had worked briefly for Dr. Saleon, a salarian geneticist. So I went to his lab, hoping to find evidence of unregulated cloned organ development. But there was nothing. No salarian hearts, no turian livers, not one krogan testicle."

Jane frowned deeply. Every organ-trafficking outfit did krogan testicles; it was the most consistently demanded of their various products, forming a steady stream of revenue. "And the geneticist?" She asked.

"I brought in some of his employees for interrogation. To see if I could get them to talk."

"Interrogation," she drawled. "Right…"

Vakarian shrugged again, nonplussed by the implied accusation that he'd overstepped his bounds. "It paid off. One of my detainees started bleeding profusely during the interview. We offered to patch him up and he got frantic. Freaked out. I ordered a full exam to find out what was going on." His mandibles twisted up in a little grimace. "Our medics found incisions all over his body. Some of them were fresh." He tilted up his head to meet Jane's eyes. "These people weren't just Dr. Saleon's employees. They were test tubes. Walking, living test tubes."

Jane's jaw clenched. "He was growing parts _inside_ them?"

Vakarian nodded slowly. "He cloned their organs right inside their own bodies. Then he harvested them and sold them off. Most of the victims were poor. He'd pay them each a small percentage of the sales, but only if the organs were good. If an organ wouldn't grow properly, he just left it in. Most of them were a mess, but only on the inside — hidden so nobody could see it."

Jane leaned back, running her fingers through her hair and reflecting once again on how much she hated scientists — especially scientists who preyed on the people at the edges. She let her eyes drift closed for a moment as she said, "I'm guessing he got away?"

Vakarian let a confirming rumble out through his subvocals, loud enough that even Jane could pick up on it. "He blew his lab, grabbed some of his 'employees', and headed for the nearest space dock. By the time I found out, his ship was already leaving. He threatened to kill his hostages if we tried to stop him." Vakarian's voice went flat, mandibles hanging limply. "I ordered Citadel defense to shoot him down, but C-Sec headquarters countermanded my order. They were worried about the hostages. Worried about the civilian casualties if the ship was destroyed so close to the Citadel. I told them those hostages were dead anyway. He'd just use them to make more organs until their bodies gave out entirely. But they wouldn't listen."

Jane chewed her bottom lip. "Tough call, especially so close to such a densely populated area. Did you pursue?"

"They sent a couple of patrol ships after him," Vakarian explained with a heaving sigh, leaning himself back again now that the worst of the story was out, "but he got away just the same." His eyes took on that hard, angry look again. "I went to Pallin and told him what I thought of him and his policies. He said if I didn't like it, I could quit." A pause, then he admitted, "I almost did. Almost decided that I'd leave C-Sec and track down Saleon on my own." Another heaving sigh. "But that would have been the end of whatever was left of my relationship with my _patrem_. I'd have been barefaced for sure."

Jane hummed in understanding. 

"Anyway, I sent out some feelers from time to time," Vakarian went on, "polished some gizzard, hoping to find something. I thought I'd found him a while back. He'd switched ships and changed his name to Dr. Heart — his idea of a joke, I guess. I got the transponder frequency for his new ship, but he was jumping on and off the grid too fast for me to convince anyone to check it out."

Jane lifted an eyebrow. "But?"

Vakarian's agitation returned. "Just got a new hit from an info broker. Saleon's ship is in the Kepler Verge, the Herschel system, but there's no way of knowing how long he'll be there."

"And you want us to go after him," Jane said.

Vakarian hesitated, face still with indecision, before he answered. "Yes, I'm asking you to go after him."

Jane took a breath, tapped her fingers against the table top in front of her, then stood up, motioning with her head for the _torin_ to follow her. Out in the CIC, she called for Pressly, and the navigator responded with relative good grace, considering she’d so recently been threatening to throw him off the ship. “Pull up our route for Virmire,” she instructed.

Pressly manipulated the galaxy map to show their proposed route in shining line with a marker showing their current location. “Mr. Moreau has us on route for the relay,” Pressly explained. “We’ll make the jump to Attican Beta...” He gestured and a new cluster appeared on the holo. “Travel time between relays is approximately 53 hours, _galactic time_.” He was unable to stop the sneer, apparently.

Jane interrupted him, pointing out a third relay just off the traced path. “And this is the relay to the Kepler Verge, yes?” 

“Yes ma’am.” 

“How much overall travel time would it add if we jumped out to the Herschel system on the way?”

Pressly pressed his lips together tightly as he performed some mental calculations. “Around 30 hours for the round trip to Herschel then back to Attican Beta.”

Jane checked her chronometer, pulling up the countdown timer that had started as soon as Rhee had sent her confirmation that the human crew of the _Daredevil_ had accepted her terms with a time line of 68 hours. As it stood, she wasn’t expecting any data for another 50 or so, which didn’t give her a ton of time for analysis before they’d be hitting Virmire airspace. This little side trip wouldn’t hurt them too bad time-wise, and it would, hopefully, help Garrus focus on the task at hand. “Add in that detour to Herschel. Vakarian will give you exact coordinates.”

She turned before Pressly could even consider questioning her orders, but not before hearing the _torin_ rumble quietly, “Thanks, Commander.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Garrus’s gizzard was clenching in an uncomfortable way as the boarding party waited for Tali to finish overriding the MSV _Fedele_ ’s airlock protocols. He shifted from foot to foot, keeping his eyes on the back of Shepard’s helmet, as Liara fidgeted idly with the pistol strapped to her hip. Tali would be staying behind on the _Normandy_ once she’d gotten them in; the possibility of Saleon’s experiments running amok made it unwise to risk the quarian if she wasn’t necessary.

The doors swished open with a sudden gust of air, and Garrus immediately pulled his rifle up to the ready. Shepard looked equally wary, stepping lightly into the freighter’s first cargo module and sweeping from side to side to check all the corners. No signs of life, but the number of crates labeled “Biohazard” in galactic trade common as well as several other languages made it clear that Saleon had been continuing his work. With a quick hand signal, Shepard directed him to scout the right side of the module while she took the left, motioning Liara to follow her. Garrus moves quickly through the space, checking all the nooks and crannies and scanning for any traps or surveillance devices. “Clear,” he called, and Shepard echoed it a moment later. 

They positioned themselves out of line of sight as Shepard hit the control on the next door. Glancing around the edge, Garrus saw a stack of crates blocking the view. “ _Tarc_ ,” he muttered under his breath. Someone here had a basic grasp of tactics.

With another hand sign for them to stay put, Shepard slipped up behind the obstacle on nearly silent feet. Garrus watched her ease around the corner far enough to get a look at the rest of the module (hopefully), then she was moving suddenly. “We’ve got casualties,” she said in a hard tone over the comms, but before Garrus and Liara had joined her, the all-too-familiar sound of rifle fire ricocheted around the metal box, and Shepard dashed back into cover. “Assault drones,” she spat. “Alliance grade. I saw two.” 

“Stay here,” Garrus told Liara, knowing her biotics would barely make a dent in mechs of that caliber. He prepped an overload on his tool, then darted forward to fry one of the flying drones. Shepard followed it up with a few well-timed shots, but her shields took a beating for it. Garrus used the distraction to pop out of cover himself and finish it off. “Got eyes on two more,” he said as he crowded back. 

“Alright, let’s split their attention,” Shepard ordered. “Give me some cover fire in three... two... one!”

Garrus did as instructed while Shepard made a mad dash across the room, managing to overload another drone as she ran. She ducked behind a console on the opposite end of the cargo module, trapping the two remaining drones between them. From there, it was easy pickings, but the small victory was sour in his throat when he saw was Shepard had already seen: the module’s walls were lined with cells, and the people inside were... husks. Lifeless. Malformed. Gaping faces and dead eyes. Bloated torsos and spindly limbs.

“By the Goddess!” Liara exclaimed as she brushed past him.

“Liara.” Shepard’s voice was controlled, though Garrus had no idea what might be going on behind her visor. “See what you can find out about their status. Vakarian, on me.”

Together, they stalked down the freighter’s drive module, taking note of the single locked door. Garrus stood guard as Shepard cleared the cockpit and long-disused crew quarters before joining him again. With a sharp nod of her head, he hacked the lock, rifle at the ready.

“Thank you!” a dark-skinned salarian squealed as soon as the door opened. “I didn’t even know there were assault drones on board until they started malfunctioning! I’d be dead for sure if you hadn’t come along.”

Garrus didn’t lower his weapon, hands steady as his mandibles tensed in rage. “That’s him,” he said. “That’s Dr. Saleon.”

“What?” the salarian barked. “My name is Heart! Dr. Heart!”

Shepard tilted her head Garrus’s way to get a look at him through her visor. “Are you sure it’s him?”

“Positive,” he assured her. “There’s no escape this time, doctor,” he told the target before his tone darkened. “I’d harvest your organs first, but we don’t have the time.”

The salarian raised his hands in defense. “You’re crazy,” he cried, then realized he should probably be begging Shepard instead of the turian threatening to gut him. “He’s crazy!” He repeated to her. “Please, don’t let him do this to me.”

Shepard lowered her Stiletto, posture settling into something less aggressive. “We’ll take him in. Arrange a transport back to C-Sec for him.”

Garrus’s jaw worked in surprise. “But we have him!” he snapped, subvocals growling in frustration. “We can’t let him get away. Not again!”

“If he dies,” Shepard said in a perfectly reasonable voice, “we’ll never know what he’s been up to, or how he did it. We’ll take him in, interrogate him, and he’ll serve his time.”

“I...” the _torin_ started to argue, then trailed off under the glare he was sure the commander was giving him. “Fine,” he bit out, not even trying to hide the mutinous sounds that rumbled in his chest. He pointed a taloned finger in Saleon’s direction. “You’re a very lucky salarian. You owe the commander your life.”

A change settled over the salarian’s shoulder as his face warped into a sneer. “Oh,” he drawled, “Thank you so very much.”

Garrus was firing as soon as he saw the faint glimmer of light on the pistol Saleon pulled from behind his back. The doctor hadn’t been wearing any shields at all, evidently not expecting anyone to get past his mechanized defenses, and he went down as quickly as the _torin_ could pull the trigger. The body hit the floor with a dull thud, and Shepard immediately moved in to kick the gun out of Saleon’s reach, just in case he wasn’t as dead as Garrus’s visor made him out to be.

For a moment, just a brief moment, Garrus realized that he should be feeling relief and satisfaction, that the sudden wave of rage — and was that fear? — that washed over him was out of line, but he was _so damn tired_ of keeping the tide at bay. “And so he dies anyway!” he roared, turning on Shepard and smashing the button on his helm to raise the visor. “What the _verberatum_ was the point of that?”

“You can’t take someone’s right to choose,” Shepard volleyed back, her own visor opening to reveal her hard dark eyes. “They get a chance at redemption.”

“Oh just like you gave Jeong a chance? We’re not even sure _he_ had _actually_ killed anyone. Shouldn’t you have given him the _choice_ to not shoot?”

Shepard’s teeth clicked together sharply before she answered. “Saleon had information we could have used—“

“Saleon was a _buratrum_ -bound piece of _tarc_!”

In the silence that followed, the blood rushing in his aural cavities, his harsh pants, the sounds of his anger were deafening, but Shepard seemed unaffected, her face set in smooth lines. “You’re dismissed, Vakarian,” she said quietly. “Get your ass back to the ship.”

Garrus glared at her for a moment longer, kicked the dead salarian for good measure, then stalked out of the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so let's talk about the Dr. Saleon mission. First of all, when Garrus is telling his story he refers to "the military." Like, what fucking military are you talking about there, Gare Bear? Does C-Sec have a military? Did you call in some favors with the Hierarchy? Was this ST&R? (My theory? Saleon had STG help to disappear, but that's neither here nor there.)
> 
> Second, the dialogue at the end of all that (if you don't opt to just mow Saleon down) was just dumb. When Garrus is all like "I've never known anyone like you, Shepard"? What is that supposed to mean? How is not shooting someone before trying to take them in peacefully unique to Garrus's life experience thus far? WHAT KIND OF COP IS HE?
> 
> NEXT TIME on TETHER THREAD:  
> Angst! Self-doubt! Disinfecting! 
> 
> (And no, we're not going to see Virmire yet. My stupid muse is being stupid and insisting on drawing this shit out for character development or some shit like that.)


End file.
